Review by Choice Review
Published in concert with the hundredth anniversary of the beginning of WW I, this study provides a chronological exploration of the war, which many believed would be "the war to end all wars," through the lens of 11 male poets-Rupert Brooke, Charles Sorley, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen, Ivor Gurney, Edmund Blunden, Julian Grenfell, Robert Nichols, Robert Graves. Each of these men experienced the war, in some capacity, as a member of the military. Egremont borrows his title from British officer Edwin Campion Vaughan's grim diary account, by the same title (1981), of the first eight months of 1917. Egremont's book is essentially an anthology of poetry paired with brief forays into somewhat romanticized literary history and military tribute. The "Prelude" and "Aftermath" sections provide some insightful material, but even these offer not so much an argument or analysis of the time period and these poets' contributions as an assertion of their importance ("how it was, for them, to be there"). Stylistically accessible, the narrative parts, as a whole, perpetuate an uncomplicated myth of war experience, patriotism, and heroism, essentially silencing or ignoring decades of scholarly research and criticism on WW I's effects, consequences, and relevance to women, men, and children of today's culture of "endless war." Summing Up: Not recommended --Jean Mills, John Jay College-CUNY
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Biographer-novelist Egremont goes the extra mile with his selection of Britain's WWI poetry. Focusing on the 11 soldiers who wrote the best and most famous war poetry, he presents their poems chronologically, in five sets of poems written in each of the war's five years and a final set of postwar work. He prefaces each set with an account of what happened to the poets during the time in which they wrote them. He introduces everything with a Prelude about the run-up to the war, especially for his 11 selectees. As former public-school boys or, in Edward Thomas' case, an established professional, 9 were junior officers. They were variously shot, gassed, shell-shocked, retired from the front, and driven mad. Six were killed, and line soldier Ivor Gurney, as gifted a composer as a poet, spent most of his postwar years in mental asylums. Hardly supplanting comprehensive anthologies like Tim Kendall's Poetry of the First World War (2013), Egremont's group-biography-cum-anthology impressively accounts for how the allusion is to Wilfred Owen the pity came to be in the poetry.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Novelist and biographer Egremont (Forgotten Land) offers an unsentimental retrospective of WWI through searing reports of "eleven fragile young men who were unlikely warriors." Mapping their experiences and poems year by year, he traces how the "patriotic emotion" of Rupert Brooke's "The Soldier" disintegrates into the bitter stoicism of Siegfried Sassoon's satires, or the grim compassion of Wilfred Owen's "Dulce Et Decorum Est." The poets's war, Egremont argues, "was seen as the truth," a vision of "incessant mechanical slaughter" that imbued British policy, memory, and literary tradition with a sense of "victimhood" and "pessimism." In focusing on biography, poetic composition and reception, and what the poets thought of each other, Egremont doesn't offer much detail about the war itself. His literary analysis tends to be broad-Isaac Rosenberg's "Dead Men's Dump" depicts "nature's obliviousness to human destruction"-and he defines the aesthetic of war poetry mainly by how it differs from modernism. However, his tale cannot fail to be touching; six of the poets die in the war, including Owen, a week before armistice. The book serves as a preface to the soaring poems themselves, as the doomed writers chronicle "the sacrifice of innocents against a relentless enemy." Agent: Gill Coleridge, Rogers, Coleridge & White. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Poetry reveals the devastating trajectory of war.On the centennial anniversary of the start of World War I, historian Egremont (Forgotten Land: Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia, 2011, etc.) considers the intersecting lives and work of 11 British poets who were soldiers and esteemed contributors to the burgeoning genre of war poetry. Many of the author's subjects are likely to be familiar to readers, including Rupert Brooke, Charles Sorley, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves; others, such as Edmund Blunden and Julian Grenfell, are lesser known today. During the war, Egremont writes, "the poets began to be lionized," invited to give readings in elite salons and sought by publishers. Six chapters focus on each year of war and its aftermath, offering an adroit biographical and historical overview, followed by a selection of poems that chronicle the writers' spirits, as they changed "from enthusiasm to pitiful weariness," from hope to disillusion. "Cast away regret and rue," Charles Sorley wrote in 1914. "Think what you are marching to." By January 1915, his letter to a friend revealed a deepening sense of dismay: "We don't seem to be winning, do we? It looks like an affair of years." A few months later, he began a poem with lines that could have served as his epitaph: "Such, such is Death: no triumph: no defeat: / Only an empty pail." In October, aged 20, he was killed by a sniper. Owen, held in high regard by Sassoon, was killed, age 25, in 1918; Brooke, Thomas and Grenfell were already dead. Those who survivede.g., Sassoon and Graves"couldn't leave the war, even ifthey wanted to move on.""What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?" Owen asked in his "Anthem for Doomed Youth." For Egremont, the poems serve as "holy glimmers" of lives lost and as powerful protests against the hell of war. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
