The long shadow cast by the poetry of the Great War is a critic’s staple. Less obviously apparent, perhaps, are some of its implications—both for the literature of the immediate post-war era and, crucially, for the people who wrote it. To start with some first principles, why should the conflict of 1914–18 have been almost instantly marked down as a “poet’s war” rather than a novelist’s or a memoirist’s? One natural explanation lies in the socio-literary crucible in which it was forged. The early twentieth century was an era when, as Penelope Fitzgerald once put it, “English people still liked poetry,” and not only liked it but thought it the most suitable aesthetic medium for that intertwining of public commemoration and private sentiment of which so much pre-twentieth-century poetry consists. As the veteran man of letters Michael Korda notes in the preface to his stimulating study Muse of Fire,

Tennyson and Kipling were national figures, and poetry mattered in a way it no longer does to us. It had a place in popular culture, it could still capture the attention, portray current or recent events and touch people’s emotions.

As for that portrayal of “current events,” the horrors of the Great War and the immediacy of those horrors to the nonparticipant—the boom of the Flanders howitzers could be heard all along Britain’s eastern coastline—demanded a response that only poetry seemed to be able to supply. A poem, after all, could be written in an hour, sent