British First World War Poetry

British poetry of the First World War ranged from patriotic verse to increasingly direct accounts of trench warfare, mutilation, fear and bereavement. Combatant poets used traditional forms while challenging public language about sacrifice and glory.

Siegfried Sassoon’s satire and protest influenced the younger Wilfred Owen, whom he met at Craiglockhart in 1917. Robert Graves and other soldier-writers also connected literary work with debates about memory, duty and the conduct of the war.

This context supports fiction about war poets, the writing and revision of poems, literary friendship and the use of art to resist official representations of modern warfare.