War Poets
Quick answer: The War Poets, including Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, wrote of the First World War with unsparing honesty. Learn their history, themes and legacy.
The War Poets are the soldier-writers of the First World War, above all Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas and Ivor Gurney, whose poems moved from patriotic idealism to unsparing testimony about the trenches. The term can cover war poetry of any era, but in English it points first to 1914 to 1918, when a generation trained on Keats and the hymn book found itself describing gas attacks and mud, and changed English poetry in the process.
Their work matters beyond its history because it poses the permanent craft question: how do you write beauty about horror without prettifying it? Owen's draft preface declared that his subject was war and the pity of war, and that the poetry is in the pity, a sentence poets still argue with.
The poem
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
Wilfred Owen, 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' (written 1917, published 1920)
From Brooke to Owen: The Arc
Early in the war, Rupert Brooke's sonnets, with their gladly offered patriot death, matched the public mood; he died in 1915 before the disillusion set in. Sassoon, a decorated officer, turned to short satirical poems that ambushed the home-front reader, and in 1917 issued a public protest against the war's conduct. Sent to Craiglockhart hospital rather than court-martialled, he met a shell-shocked younger officer named Wilfred Owen and encouraged him. In the next year Owen wrote nearly all his great poems, half-rhymes grinding against elegy, before being killed one week before the Armistice. His collected poems appeared in 1920, and his reputation has led the group ever since.
Isaac Rosenberg, a working-class private and painter, brought a stranger, more modern eye to trench life; Edward Thomas wrote the war obliquely through English landscape; Gurney, composer and poet, carried the damage home for decades.
Craft Under Pressure
Technically, the War Poets are a masterclass in tension between form and content. Owen kept sonnets, elegies and pararhyme while filling them with the unspeakable, so the forms themselves seem wounded. Sassoon weaponised the punchline, letting a comfortable stanza detonate in its final line. The lesson travels to any difficult subject: grief, illness, violence. Judges scoring poems on emotion and structure, as Writory's do each month, consistently reward that controlled collision rather than raw outpouring.
What poets can take from this
- Read Owen's pararhymes aloud, escaped and scaped effects of near-sound, and try one stanza of your own in half-rhyme.
- Study Sassoon's endings to learn how a final line can reverse a poem's apparent politeness.
- When writing about violence or grief, anchor every claim in one physical, checkable detail.
- Let form push back against your subject; a strict stanza around chaotic material creates the tremor these poets mastered.
- Beware secondhand outrage: the War Poets earned their authority through witness, so ground your poem in what you truly know.
Try it yourself
Write an elegy in strict quatrains for someone harmed by an institution's decision, using at least one half-rhyme per stanza and no abstract words such as war, justice or sacrifice.
Questions
Who are considered the main First World War poets?
Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Ivor Gurney and Charles Sorley are the names most often taught, with Owen generally ranked first for the depth and craft of his 1917 to 1918 poems.
Why did war poetry change so much between 1914 and 1918?
The gap between heroic expectation and industrial slaughter destroyed the old patriotic idiom. Poets who had lived through the Somme and Passchendaele needed harsher diction, irony and broken music to tell the truth as they saw it.
Does the term War Poets only apply to the First World War?
No, poets such as Keith Douglas wrote memorably of the Second World War, but in British usage the phrase points first to the 1914 to 1918 generation, whose work defined the modern genre.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.