Discussed in this essay:

Some Desperate Glory: The First World War the Poets Knew, by Max Egremont. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 352 pages. $28.

“All a poet can do today is warn,” wrote Wilfred Owen in the preface to a book of poems he was planning when he was killed, one week before the Armistice of November 11, 1918. “That is why the true Poets must be truthful.” The warnings of the First World War poets — Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Ivor Gurney, Edward Thomas — are no less urgent for having been so thoroughly ignored…