The Winter of the World, Edited by Dominic Hibberd & John Onions

As always with UK anthologies, this collection of "poems of the Great War" puts a barbed-wire fence around the British muse to exclude French, German, Russian and Italian voices.

That limitation aside, the editors recruit more widely and marshall their material more shrewdly than normal. The year-by-year arrangement means that the reader moves from summery hope to mud-bound despair – but, among the disenchanted Owens, Sassoons and Rosenbergs, we never lose sight of the gung-ho patriotism that persisted in verse to the bitter end.

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