World War I is usually remembered in black-and-white pictures, but in Britain (and among readers of British literature), the keepers of memory were often poets. A remarkable generation of young writers volunteered for service when war began and selections of their work (and summaries of their lives) are collected in Some Desperate Glory. Max Egremont looks sympathetically at Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen and others, and examines their disparate responses to the war. Most of the poets entered the fray, thinking themselves as adventurers or soldiers in a just war. Assumptions were shattered and, in many cases, lives (and creativity) cut short.
