Poets of the Great War: Faber & Faber, 2014: Robert Graves, Selected Poems; edited by Michael Longley
Poets of the Great War: Faber & Faber, 2014: Robert Graves, Selected Poems; edited by Michael Longley Faber have released a set of volumes of the Great War poets to coincide with the centenary of the conflict. World War 1 was fought at a time when the dominance of the moving image was not yet complete hence the plethora of written testaments presented here. The war was also yet more gruesome and extreme since it was industrialised and mechanised and thus different from earlier wars (with perhaps only the Boer War fought around the turn of the century giving the British a foretaste of what was to come). Therefore, the written medium was the most immediate way to record the events that were happening and obviously had none of the fallibility and cumbersome qualities of cameras of that era. There were poets in later wars but the Great War threw up so many disparate voices, clear evidence of the unbelievable psychological destructiveness of the fighting, the evocation of feelings