Up The Line To Death: The War Poets 1914-1918 is a poetry anthology edited by Brian Gardner

Brian Gardner

Brian Gardner, also known as Brian "Big Bass" Gardner is a mastering engineer. He has worked on countless recordings since the mid-1960s, including classic rock, funk, disco, alternative rock, R&B, hip hop, pop punk, and dance pop. He is perhaps best known for his work on hip hop albums and in...

, and first published in 1964. It was a significant revisiting of the tradition of the war poet

War poet

A War poet is a poet writing in time of and on the subject of war. The term, which is applied especially to those in military service during World War I, was documented as early as 1848 in reference to German revolutionary poet, Georg Herwegh.-Crimean War:...

, writing in
English, though by no means the only such collection; and was backed up by strong biographical research on the poets included. Those were mainly British and Irish combattants of World War I

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

; but there are also Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

n, Canadian

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

 and Americans poets. The poems are arranged roughly in chronological order, from the start of the war to the end. Some contemporary poems by major poets not involved in the fighting are also given. The title of the anthology comes from the Siegfried Sassoon poem Base Details

Base Details

Base Details is a war poem by the English war poet Siegfried Sassoon. In the poem Sassoon condemns what he saw as the incompetence and callous indifference to the soldiers at the front displayed by the staff officers, or "scarlet majors" of the British Army, who stayed at the Base "Guzzling and...

.

Poets in Up The Line To Death

Richard Aldington

Richard Aldington

Richard Aldington , born Edward Godfree Aldington, was an English writer and poet.Aldington was best known for his World War I poetry, the 1929 novel, Death of a Hero, and the controversy arising from his 1955 Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Inquiry...

 - Martin Armstrong - Herbert Asquith - Maurice Baring

Maurice Baring

Maurice Baring was an English man of letters, known as a dramatist, poet, novelist, translator and essayist, and also as a travel writer and war correspondent...

 - Leonard Barnes

Leonard Barnes

Leonard John Barnes MC and Bar was a British anti-colonialist writer, journalist and educationalist. Educated at St Paul's School , he was awarded the Military Cross and Bar during World War I while serving with the King's Royal Rifle Corps and then attended University College, Oxford, before...

 - Paul Bewsher - Laurence Binyon

Laurence Binyon

Robert Laurence Binyon was an English poet, dramatist and art scholar. His most famous work, For the Fallen, is well known for being used in Remembrance Sunday services....

 - John Peale Bishop

John Peale Bishop

John Peale Bishop was an American poet and man of letters.Bishop was born in Charles Town, West Virginia, to a family from New England, and attended school in Hagerstown, Maryland. When 18, Bishop fell victim to a severe illness and lost his sight for some time...

 - Edmund Blunden

Edmund Blunden

Edmund Charles Blunden, MC was an English poet, author and critic. Like his friend Siegfried Sassoon, he wrote of his experiences in World War I in both verse and prose. For most of his career, Blunden was also a reviewer for English publications and an academic in Tokyo and later Hong Kong...

 - Rupert Brooke

Rupert Brooke

Rupert Chawner Brooke was an English poet known for his idealistic war sonnets written during the First World War, especially The Soldier...

 - Leslie Coulson

Leslie Coulson

Leslie Coulson was an English journalist and a poet of the First World War.Coulson was born in Kilburn, London, his father being a columnist for The Sunday Chronicle. Leslie and his brother attended boarding school in Norfolk, and Leslie then worked as a reporter on the Evening News...

 - E. E. Cummings

E. E. Cummings

Edward Estlin Cummings , popularly known as E. E. Cummings, with the abbreviated form of his name often written by others in lowercase letters as e.e. cummings , was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright...

 - Jeffery Day

Jeffery Day

Miles Jeffery Game Day DSC was an English war poet, killed in an air battle towards the end of World War I over the sea. The account of his death by his commanding officer stated...

 - Geoffrey Dearmer

Geoffrey Dearmer

Geoffrey Dearmer LVO was a British poet. He was the son of Anglican liturgist and hymnologist Percy Dearmer.During World War I, Dearmer was commissioned and served with the London Regiment at Gallipoli and on the Western Front. Many of his poems dealt with the overall brutality of war and...

 - John Drinkwater - Lord Dunsany

Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany

Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany was an Irish writer and dramatist, notable for his work, mostly in fantasy, published under the name Lord Dunsany...

 - J. Griffyth Fairfax

J. Griffyth Fairfax

James Griffyth Fairfax was a British poet and translator.Fairfax, a grandson of the Australian newspaper tycoon John Fairfax, was educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford...

 - Gilbert Frankau

Gilbert Frankau

Gilbert Frankau was a popular British novelist. He was known also for verse including a number of verse novels, and short stories....

 - John Freeman

John Freeman (Georgian poet)

John Frederick Freeman, , was an English poet and essayist, who gave up a successful career in insurance to write full time.He was born in London, and started as an office boy aged 13...

 - Crosbie Garstin - Wilfrid Gibson - Robert Graves

Robert Graves

Robert von Ranke Graves 24 July 1895 – 7 December 1985 was an English poet, translator and novelist. During his long life he produced more than 140 works...

 - Julian Grenfell

Julian Grenfell

The Honourable Julian Henry Francis Grenfell DSO , was a British soldier and poet of World War I.-Early life:Julian Grenfell was born at 4 St James's Square, London, the eldest son of William Grenfell, later Baron Desborough, and Ethel Priscilla Fane, daughter of Julian Fane...

 - Wyn Griffith - Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy, OM was an English novelist and poet. While his works typically belong to the Naturalism movement, several poems display elements of the previous Romantic and Enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural.While he regarded himself primarily as a...

 - F. W. Harvey

F. W. Harvey

Frederick William Harvey was an English poet, known for poems composed in prisoner-of-war camps at Krefeld and Gütersloh that were sent back to England, during World War I....

 - A. P. Herbert

A. P. Herbert

Sir Alan Patrick Herbert, CH was an English humorist, novelist, playwright and law reform activist...

 - W. N. Hodgson

W. N. Hodgson

William Noel Hodgson MC was an English poet of the First World War. During the war, he published stories and poems under the pen name Edward Melbourne.-Life:...

 - A. E. Housman

A. E. Housman

Alfred Edward Housman , usually known as A. E. Housman, was an English classical scholar and poet, best known to the general public for his cycle of poems A Shropshire Lad. Lyrical and almost epigrammatic in form, the poems were mostly written before 1900...

 - Philip Johnstone - David Jones

David Jones (poet)

David Jones CH was both a painter and one of the first generation British modernist poets. As a painter he worked chiefly in watercolor, painting portraits and animal, landscape, legendary and religious subjects. He was also a wood-engraver and designer of inscriptions. As a writer he was...

 - T. M. Kettle - Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English poet, short-story writer, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. Kipling received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature...

 - Francis Ledwidge

Francis Ledwidge

Francis Edward Ledwidge was an Irish war poet from County Meath. Sometimes known as the "poet of the blackbirds", he was killed in action at the Battle of Passchendaele during World War I.-Early life:...

 - P. H. B. Lyon

P. H. B. Lyon

Percy Hugh Beverley Lyon MC was a 20th-century British poet and educator, a winner of the Newdigate Prize and headmaster of Rugby School from 1931 to 1948.-Life:...

 - D. S. MacColl - John McCrae

John McCrae

Lieutenant Colonel John Alexander McCrae was a Canadian poet, physician, author, artist and soldier during World War I and a surgeon during the Second Battle of Ypres...

 - Patrick MacGill

Patrick MacGill

Patrick MacGill was an Irish journalist, poet and novelist, known as "The Navvy Poet" because he had worked as a navvy before he began writing.MacGill was born in Glenties, County Donegal...

 - E. A. Mackintosh - R. B. Marriott-Watson - A. A. Milne

A. A. Milne

Alan Alexander Milne was an English author, best known for his books about the teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh and for various children's poems. Milne was a noted writer, primarily as a playwright, before the huge success of Pooh overshadowed all his previous work.-Biography:A. A...

 - Harold Monro

Harold Monro

Harold Edward Monro was a British poet, the proprietor of the Poetry Bookshop in London which helped many famous poets bring their work before the public....

 - Sir Henry Newbolt - Robert Nichols - Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen MC was an English poet and soldier, one of the leading poets of the First World War...

 - Nowell Oxland - Robert Palmer - Max Plowman

Max Plowman

Max Plowman was a British writer and pacifist.-Life to 1918:He was born in Northumberland Park, Tottenham, in London. He left school at 16, and worked for a decade in his father's brick business. He became a journalist and poet...

 - Herbert Read

Herbert Read

Sir Herbert Edward Read, DSO, MC was an English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art. He was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism, and was strongly influenced by proto-existentialist thinker Max Stirner....

 - Edgell Rickword

Edgell Rickword

John Edgell Rickword, MC was an English poet, critic, journalist and literary editor. He became one of the leading communist intellectuals active in the 1930s.-Early life:He was born in Colchester, Essex...

 - Isaac Rosenberg

Isaac Rosenberg

Isaac Rosenberg was an English poet of the First World War who was considered to be one of the greatest of all English war poets...

 - Siegfried Sassoon

Siegfried Sassoon

Siegfried Loraine Sassoon CBE MC was an English poet, author and soldier. Decorated for bravery on the Western Front, he became one of the leading poets of the First World War. His poetry both described the horrors of the trenches, and satirised the patriotic pretensions of those who, in Sassoon's...

 - R. H. Sauter - Alan Seeger

Alan Seeger

Alan Seeger was an American poet who fought and died in World War I serving in the French Foreign Legion. A statue to his memory and to...

 - Robert W. Service

Robert W. Service

Robert William Service was a poet and writer who has often been called "the Bard of the Yukon".Service is best known for his poems "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" and "The Cremation of Sam McGee", from his first book, Songs of a Sourdough...

 - Edward Shanks

Edward Shanks

Edward Richard Buxton Shanks was an English writer, known as a war poet of World War I, then as an academic and journalist, and literary critic and biographer. He also wrote some science fiction....

 - Patrick Shaw-Stewart

Patrick Shaw-Stewart

Patrick Houston Shaw-Stewart was a brilliant Eton College and Oxford scholar of the Edwardian era who died on active service as a battalion commander in the Royal Naval Division during the First World War....

 - Osbert Sitwell

Osbert Sitwell

Sir Francis Osbert Sacheverell Sitwell, 5th Baronet, was an English writer. His elder sister was Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell and his younger brother was Sir Sacheverell Sitwell; like them he devoted his life to art and literature....

 - C. H. Sorley - Edward de Stein - E. W. Tennant - Edward Thomas

Edward Thomas

Edward Thomas may refer to:People:*Edward Beers Thomas, American judge*Edward J. Thomas , librarian and author of several books on the history of Buddhism*Edward Lloyd Thomas, Confederate American Civil War general...

 - Edward Thompson

Edward Thompson

Edward Thompson is the name of:* Edward Thompson , English landowner and politician* Edward Thompson , MP and Lord of the Admiralty...

 - W. J. Turner - R. E. Vernède

R. E. Vernède

Robert Ernest Vernède was an English poet and writer, now remembered as a war poet.He was born in London, and educated at St Paul's School and at St John's College, Oxford. After graduating, he wrote novels and short stories....

 - Alec Waugh

Alec Waugh

Alexander Raban Waugh , was a British novelist, the elder brother of the better-known Evelyn Waugh and son of Arthur Waugh, author, literary critic, and publisher...

 - Willoughby Weaving

Willoughby Weaving

Willoughby Weaving was a British writer and poet of the First World War era.Willoughby Weaving was the son of Harry Walker Weaving, brewer and farmer, of Pewet House, Abingdon. He entered Abingdon School and Pembroke College, Oxford, becoming a schoolmaster at Rockport School and headmaster and...

 - I. A. Williams - T. P. Cameron Wilson

T. P. Cameron Wilson

Theodore Percival Cameron Wilson , was an English poet and novelist of World War I, best known for his poem Magpies in Picardy....

 - W. B. Yeats - E. Hilton Young - Francis Brett Young

Francis Brett Young

Francis Brett Young was an English novelist, poet, playwright, and composer.-Life:Brett Young was born in Halesowen, Worcestershire. He schooled first at a private school in Sutton Coldfield...