Some Desperate Glory: The First World War the Poets Knew

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.” [em]Agent: Gill Coleridge, Rogers, Coleridge & White. (June) [/em]