Daniel Swift

Anthem For Doomed Youth

Strange Meetings: The Poets of the Great War

By

Chatto & Windus 278pp £20 order from our bookshop

Robert Graves went to fight the First World War with a knapsack full of ‘Keats, Homer, and the novelist Samuel Butler’. Siegfried Sassoon followed, carrying with him ‘Hardy’s The Dynasts, Conrad’s A Set of Six, Charles Lamb’s essays and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales’, and when they met in a mess in northern France they inevitably talked about books. Harry Ricketts’s admirable new study emphasises the influences shared between the poets of what used to be called ‘the Great War’. These were always poets in company, in the presence of their dead predecessors or, often, their soon-to-be-dead peers.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • The author 'seethes with contemptuous indignation at the shiny junk that an unregulated construction industry dumps… ,
    • 'The physical courage he demonstrated as a young man [...] gave way to intellectual power; radical thought, gifted… ,
    • 'While Jane Austen didn’t perhaps achieve the full recognition that she deserved in her lifetime, even then she out… ,
    • 'All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And t… ,
    • 'You are interested in a particular subject; basic research hardens this interest into an obsession, after which th… ,
    • 'Keynes predicted that future generations would enjoy such an improved standard of living that they might work just… ,
    • 'Various dislocations ... emerge, iceberg-like, out of a troubled sea of unconscious motivation and confront Eisenb… ,
    Follow Us