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POETRY does not play a large part in most people’s lives but it does touch a nerve when it comes to war and its emotional impact is more immediate and dramatic.
It brings home the sacrifice, the horror and the seeming futility of war, especially the total and industrial war as waged in the First World War, and the poetry of Sasscon, Brooke and Owen has seated itself into our imagination.
We should not forget, as Stallworthy points out, war was once a topic of glory and romance in poetry, and by including Homer’s Ilian and works by poets such as Chaucer he attempts to redress the balance.
Steve Craggs
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