Synopsis
With every year interest grows in the extraordinary eruption of poetry that the First World War inspired: the patriotic, the unquestioning, the bitter, the brutal, the idealistic and realistic, the love poems and the hate poems, the works of the professionals and the gifted amateurs.
Everyone has his or her 'favourite poet' - one who touches an emotional chord in today's reader from over three quarters of a century ago. This unusual and beautiful book collects together many of these often read, well-loved poets, as well as some of the lesser known. Tonie and Valmai Holt give comprehensive biographical studies which firmly place the poets in the battlefield and literary context in which their work was conceived. Much new material is included in these original essays. Each section is illustrated by, and many have contributions from, the talented freelance artist, writer and researcher, Charlotte Zeepvat, and has one of their subject's most interesting poems reproduced in 'script'.
Sadly, many of these young poets lie on the battlefields of France and Belgium where they fought. Among them are several who, with the benefit of hindsight, are today judged to have had the potential to join the ranks of Britain's greatest poets: Isaac Rosenberg, Charles Sorley and Wilfred Owens. Also included in the book are the lovers Vera Brittain and Roland Leighton; the perceived 'golden lads' Rupert Brooke, Edward Wyndham Tennant and Julian Grenfell. There are the thoughtful older men, Edward Thomas and Robert Vernede; the troubled Ivor Gurney and Siegfried Sassoon; the caring young officers E. A. Mackintosh. A. P. Herbert and W. N. Hodgson: the whimsical Gilbert Frankau and W. W. Gibson; the autobiographers Robert Graves and Edmund Blunden; the American volunteer Alan Seeger; the journalist Leslie Coulson; the exceptional human being the Rev G. A. Studert Kennedy ('Woodbine Willie') and the author of the war's most famous poem, John McCrae.
From the Author
The title of this book is taken from a poem that Roland Leighton wrote to Vera Brittain from Ploegsteert Wood in April 1915. He had also sent her 4 violets that he had found in the Wood and in 1933 Vera still had them. 'The blue is brown now and wrinkled.....' she wrote. Roland was killed on 23 September 1915 and is buried in Louvencourt CWGC Cemetery. The double picture inside the front covers of Major and Mrs Holt's Battlefield Guide to the Somme (6th Edition) shows Louvencourt CWGC Cemetery as the sun goes down - 'We will remember them.'
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
