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This book is not about heroes. English Poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War.

To mark the WWI centenary, we’ve put together a sampling of poems written in English by both soldiers and civilians, chosen from our archive of over 250 poems from WWI. We’ve also compiled a collection showcasing the poets who served and volunteered in World War I.

While many of these poems do not address a particular war event, we’ve listed them by year, along with a selection of historical markers, to contextualize the poems historically. You may notice that more poems in 1914 and 1915 extoll the old virtues of honor, duty, heroism, and glory, while many later poems after 1915 approach these lofty abstractions with far greater skepticism and moral subtlety through realism and bitter irony. Though horrific depictions of battle in poetry date back to Homer’s Iliad, the later poems of WWI mark a substantial shift in how we view war and sacrifice."- THE EDITORS

Originally Published: August 04, 2014.

In this article and podcast video below, you’ll learn how particular styles of photography altered over the decades. We’ll talk about the genesis of these movements, the pioneers behind them and how society’s views on photography changed too. Walton, S. (2023). The History of Photography Movements. [online] Online photography courses from iPhotography. Available at: https://www.iphotography.com/blog/the-history-of-photography-movements/ [Accessed 28 Feb. 2025].

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Among the great figures of the war were its documentarians—the poets who served in the war as soldiers or witnessed its effects in their time and responded with their personal accounts.

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Banding together in a loosely-knit group, these writers and artists used any public forum they could find to (metaphorically) spit on nationalism, rationalism, materialism and any other -ism which they felt had contributed to a senseless war.