'The truth untold,/ The pity of war, the pity war distilled...'

Here are the extraordinary writings of a generation who fought through a war of unprecedented destructive power, and who had to find new voices to express the horror of what they discovered. The great names - Owen, Sassoon - are fully represented, but there are also many poems by lesser-known or unexpected figures, ranging from serving soldiers like Isaac Rosenberg and Richard Aldington to women such as Edith Nesbit and Vera Brittain. The poems are arranged by theme to give a sense of how the writers' feelings and attitudes evolved.