​​​​Simon Davies​

The Hell Where Youth and Laughter Went: Poetry of the Great War

by Simon Davies

 

Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg ... so many names that have become inextricably linked to the vast output of poetry that accompanied the First World War. In the midst of the harsh realities of battle, why did so many feel the need to put pen to paper and express themselves in verse? And what sort of legacy do these writings leave us today as we approach the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914, a war that caused the deaths of millions of civilians and military personnel? This work provides a general overview of those poems written on the war fronts at sea, in the air and on land, and, more particularly, in the trenches, in an attempt to answer these questions.

The title of the book is derived from the final line of Siegfried Sassoon’s poem “Suicide in the Trenches”: “You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye / Who cheer when soldier lads march by, / Sneak home and pray you’ll never know / The hell where youth and laughter go.”