War poetry to die for

ed Dominic Hibberd and John Onions (Constable, £25)

War broke: and now the Winter of the world/ With perishing great darkness closes in," wrote the young Wilfred Owen in 1914. And we have been living with the consequences ever since. The First World War produced many great poems - and also a good deal of unsophisticated verse which is worth reading. More recent anthologies have found space for lesser and anonymous poets, and for civilians including women.

Dominic Hibberd (Owen's biographer) and John Onions have produced the first collection to print the poems in chronological order, so we can see how people who knew nothing about modern war ended up knowing much more than they wished.

High-flown romantic verse gave way to detailed descriptions of mud, rats and barbed wire. Some writers protested from the start and others went on believing to the end. Some of the 120 poets and 250 poets in this volume are patriotic, some pacifist, some comic, some religious, many very angry. Marvellous work by Owen, Sassoon, Hardy and Kipling lies next to wretched doggerel. Each piece is carefully dated and there are meticulous notes.

Nearly all the famous poets are here, but not Binyon (For the Fallen) or Alan Seeger, whose Rendezvous is a love poem to death. On the other hand, even those who think they know the period well will find several new voices.

The last section covers the years between the Armistice and 1930. The sacrifices had not produced a better world.

Vera Brittain wrote about disillusionment and the pain of superfluous women, and Modernists like Pound and Herbert Read wrote free verse of a kind never seen before. The old ways of writing seemed dead, along with some of the best younger poets. Read this, and you will see how English poetry changed for all time.