war poetry, 20th-cent.

war poetry, 20th-cent. It is generally agreed that the First World War inspired poetry of the highest order, some of it ground-breaking in both treatment of subject and technique: soldier-poets included W. Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg, Robert Graves, E. Thomas, and R. Brooke, and memorable poems and elegies on the theme were also contributed by Hardy, Binyon, A. E. Housman and others. Kipling's poetry struck a different and more patriotic note from that of most of his contemporaries, but the anguish of losing his son to the conflict left a deep mark on him and his work. The Spanish Civil War, very much a writers' war, attracted some important British poets, including John Cornford, Spender, Auden, and MacNeice, as well as less well-remembered names like those of Clive Branson, Miles Tomalin, Bernard Gutteridge, and H. B. Mallalieu. The Second World War produced a more disparate response: the poets most commonly associated with it are K. Douglas, Alun Owen, and S. Keyes, all of whom died in the conflict. However, F. T. Prince, J. Pudney and H. Reed are widely remembered for single, much-anthologized war poems, as well as other work, and later anthologies have revealed a considerable wealth and diversity of responses, some by writers like Alan Ross and C. Causley who moved on to other subjects, some by writers who moved on to other careers.