George Parfitt aims to recover a sense of the poetry of the war and places it in a context of national, cultural, and literary history. One of his aims is to recover a sense of the range of responses to the war that were recorded in the poetry of the time, and to suggest that the tendency to focus on just a few well-known figures (Brooke, Owen, and Sassoon) distorts our sense of what the poetry can tell us about the war itself and its appalling effects. Contents: 1 Overviews; 2 Cleansing and Ruper Brooke; 3 Satire and Siegfried Sassoon; 4 The Voice of the Noncommissioned; 5 Belief and Wilfred Owen; 6 England: Country and History; 7 Robert Graves; 8 Reception and Valuing; Conclusion; Bibliography.