In expressing the horrors of the Great War, the First World War Poets discarded the old notions of glory and heroism. Instead they spoke directly from experience to explain the war to those at home. The savage and bitter poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen has epitomized the experience of the First World war for succeeding generations. Robert Graves, Frederick Manning and Guy Chapman also produced masterpieces of prose.
We will see where Ivor Gurney set to music the verse of his friend Will Harvey and where another composer, George Butterworth lost his life.
Our journey takes us from the Somme to the 1918 battlefields where Wilfred Owen won the MC and the cellar from which Owen wrote his last letter before he was killed in an attack just eight days before the Armistice. We visit the graves of the poets Julian Grenfell and John McCrae, who believed that the First World war was just and worthy, and Isaac Rosenberg and Edward Thomas, both killed at the Battle of Arras. William Noel Hodgson, who predicted his own death in verse, lies buried with his men in the haunting Devonshire Trench Cemetery.
There is no more moving or powerful evocation of the Great War than hearing the words of soldiers at the places where they fought and died. We examine the work and experiences of poets Owen, Sassoon, Graves, Manning, the Canadian John McCrae and many other writers. Let us know if some poetry, writing or writer is of particular interest to you. Simon Jones, our experienced and popular battlefield guide, teaches the history, poetry, literature and art of the Great War at Liverpool University.
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