Volume 22, Number 16 · October 16, 1975
Hello to All That
By Karl Miller
The Great War and Modern Memory
by Paul Fussell
Oxford University Press, 352 pp., $13.95
Wilfred Owen
by Jon Stallworthy
Oxford University Press, 333 pp., $18.50
Journey to the Trenches: The Life of Isaac Rosenberg 1890-1918
by Joseph Cohen
Basic Books, 224 pp., $12.95
Isaac Rosenberg: The Half Used Life
by Jean Liddiard
Gollancz (London), 287 pp., £6.00
Isaac Rosenberg: Poet and Painter
by Jean Moorcroft Wilson
Cecil Woolf (London), 220 pp., £4.75
Keith Douglas 1920-1944
by Desmond Graham
Oxford University Press, 312 pp., $17.75
Keats, Shelley, and Byron died young. They were doomed youth. They were the war poets of a time before there were any. Neither Keats nor Shelley was machine-gunned in Flanders, but their followers or epigoni were, and Byron went out to fight for Greece and fell at Missolonghi, of a fever, not far from the scene of Rupert Brooke's death, from blood poisoning, in 1915. Their poetry helped to write the poetry of future wars, and their fate helped to spread and perpetuate that feeling for misery and loss, for the destruction of talent and beauty, for blighted promise, for the outcast, the orphan, for the massacre of innocents, by which the romantic person was distinguished. It can sometimes appear that the Great War, when war poets came into being and were required by the public, was shaped by a scenario prepared in the heyday of Romanticism a hundred years before.
Review, 4417 words
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