The poetry of the world war of 1914-18 which is now regarded as the most significant is that produced by Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and, to a lesser degree, Edmund Blunden, Ivor Gurney and Isaac Rosenberg. All produced poems that, by focusing on specific incidents from the war and voicing anger or bitterness at the colossal waste of life they witnessed, revitalised earlier poetic forms at the same time as making powerful personal statements.

Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) had written poetry before the war, largely in the pastoral-realist style of the Georgian poetry anthologies, but the war gave his writing a far stronger individual tone, marked by a combination of unflinching description of detailed individual events and

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Published 09 September 2008

Citation: Sillars, Stuart. "British Poetry of World War I". The Literary Encyclopedia. 9 September 2008.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=5542, accessed 20 November 2009.]