The Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War

Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon are the poets who, at least in England, are most frequently associated with the First World War. Excerpts from a handful of their poems have become iconic, often due to their patriotism, such as Brookes’ famous lines, “That there’s some corner of a foreign field/That is forever England […]”. Writing this review as the UK’s centennial commemorations of the beginning of the First World War reach an end, I cannot but be aware of how this particular body of poetry is used to various cultural ends, shaping, remaking and augmenting cultural understandings of...