First published in 1976

Poets from Homer and Virgil to Tennyson and Hardy have written much about armed conflict on land and sea but it was not until the end of the First World War that the term War Poetry was used to describe not merely that verse which took war as its subject but a kind of poetry which had not been written before, a literature which did not celebrate the martial virtues but one which was created by those who had endured battle and described in exact and often brutal terms just what it was like to be a fighting man in the first Great War of the twentieth century.

This is a collection of essays on the following poets: Keith Douglas; Alun Lewis; Sidney Keyes; Roy Fuller; Alan Ross and Charles Causley; Henry Reed and others and American Poets of the Second World War.