Look again – the first world war poets weren’t pacifists

If the poets of the first world war probably enjoy a higher profile now than they have done at any time in the last 100 years, it has not been a smooth passage. When Wilfred Owen was killed in the last week of the fighting he was still virtually unknown, and even 25 years later in the middle of another war, when the ludicrous Robert Nichols — the man Edmund Gosse had once seen as a new Keats and Shelley combined — brought out his anthology of first world war poetry, there was still room for only four poems by Owen and none at all by Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas or Ivor Gurney.

I don’t suppose there are many readers now who would argue with the prominence given by Max Egremont to these four poets, but it is worth remembering that there is nothing either fixed or inevitable in the literary canon that lies behind any such collection as this. Nichols might not be the best guide to anything or anyone except himself (his favourite music, he told Eddie Marsh, was ‘the sound of my own voice’), but if it is easy enough to ignore a disappointed old poseur one only has to glance through the index to 20 years of the Cambridge literary journal Scrutiny — nothing on ‘Little Wilfred’, nothing on Sassoon, nothing on Blunden, nothing on Graves as a poet, only a small pat on the head for Gurney as a composer — to get a salutary reminder that with the exception of Rosenberg and, to a lesser extent, Thomas, those poets that now seem the most distinctive and important voices to emerge from the war did not necessarily seem so to their own generation.

This is not simply another anthology of the ‘best’ poetry of the Great War, though, but an attempt to tell the story of the war through its poets and explore their development through the impact of the conflict on their writing.