Look again – the first world war poets weren’t pacifists

If the poets of the first world war probably enjoy a higher profile now than they have done at any time in the last 100 years, it has not been a smooth passage. When Wilfred Owen was killed in the last week of the fighting he was still virtually unknown, and even 25 years later in the middle of another war, when the ludicrous Robert Nichols — the man Edmund Gosse had once seen as a new Keats and Shelley combined — brought out his anthology of first world war poetry, there was still room for only four poems by Owen and none at all by Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas or Ivor Gurney.

I don’t suppose there are many readers now who would argue with the prominence given by Max Egremont to these four poets, but it is worth remembering that there is nothing either fixed or inevitable in the literary canon that lies behind any such collection as this.