The Red Sweet Wine of Youth, By Nicholas Murray

This absorbing work demolishes a comon misapprehension: "the British First World War poets were not anti-war but 'anti-heroic'".

Owen won the MC after writing "Dolce et Decorum Est" ("Here is a gas poem," he wrote to his sister.)

Ranging from Julian Grenfell, who saw "death in battle as an affirmation of life", to the lack of "explicit protest" in Isaac Rosenberg's "Dead Man's Dump" ("earth has waited… Fretting for their decay:/ Now she has them at last"), Murray takes a fresh look at one of poetry's great moments.