Poetry often lingers on thoughts of mortality, and nowhere is this more poignant than in the words of the war poets, many of whom themselves did not survive. Until the First World War, poems about warfare gloried in the nobility of the cause, conduct or sacrifice. Perhaps Brooke's famous verse is the last expression of this sentiment, as the mass slaughter of Flanders exposed a generation of poets to a different vision of what war amounted to. Here, we recall some of the English language's most famous poems about war.
- Chinua Achebe - Vultures
- John Agard - Flag
- WH Auden - The Shield of Achilles
- Laurence Binyon - For the Fallen
- Laurence Binyon - The Burning Of The Leaves
- Rupert Brooke - The Soldier
- Bruce Dawe - Homecoming
- Bruce Dawe - Weapons Training
- Keith Douglas - Aristocrats: I think I am becoming a God
- Carol Ann Duffy - Last Post
- Carol Ann Duffy - War Photographer
- Bob Dylan - Masters of War
- James Graham - On the death of a soldier
- Robert Graves - A Dead Boche
- Thomas Hardy - Drummer Hodge
- Thomas Hardy - In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'
- Seamus Heaney - Requiem for the Croppies
- AE Housman - Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries
- Ted Hughes - Bayonet Charge
- Randall Jarrell - The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
- Rudyard Kipling - A Dead Statesman - from 'Epitaphs of the War. 1914-18'
- Rudyard Kipling - Dane-geld
- Rudyard Kipling - Tommy
- Philip Larkin - MCMXIV
- Robert Lowell - For the Union Dead
- John Gillespie Magee - High Flight
- John McCrae - In Flanders Fields
- John McCrae - The Unconquered Dead
- Adrian Mitchell - Fifteen Million Plastic Bags
- Wilfred Owen - Anthem For Doomed Youth
- Wilfred Owen - Dulce Et Decorum Est
- Wilfred Owen - Exposure
- Wilfred Owen - Futility
- Wilfred Owen - Parable of the Old Man and the Young
- Wilfred Owen - Strange Meeting
- Henry Reed - Lessons of the War
- Isaac Rosenberg - Break of Day in the Trenches
- Isaac Rosenberg - Dead Man's Dump
- Siegfried Sassoon - Atrocities
- Siegfried Sassoon - Christ And The Soldier
- Siegfried Sassoon - Everyone Sang
- Siegfried Sassoon - Suicide in the Trenches
- Siegfried Sassoon - The Death Bed
- Siegfried Sassoon - The General
- Alan Seeger - I Have a Rendezvous with Death
- Stephen Spender - Two Armies
- Alfred Lord Tennyson - The Charge of the Light Brigade
- Edward Thomas - The Owl
- WB Yeats - An Irish Airman forsees his Death