Rupert Brooke, Charles Sorley, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen

Abstract This book examines how, when, and why four First World War poets engaged with Greek and Roman antiquity. Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, and Charles Sorley all died in the war. They came from diverse social, educational, and cultural backgrounds but for each of the writers engagement with classical material was decisive in shaping their war poetry. The world views and cultural hinterlands of Brooke and Sorley were framed by the Greek and Latin texts they had studied at school, whereas for Owen, who struggled with Latin, classical texts were a part of his aspirational literary imagination. Rosenberg’s education was limited but he encountered some Greek and Roman literature through translations, and through mediations in English literature. The various ways in which the poets engaged with classical literature are analysed in the commentaries, which are designed to be accessible to classicists and to users from other subject areas. The extensive range of connections made by the poets and by subsequent readers is explained in the Introduction to the volume. The commentaries illuminate relationships between the poems and attitudes to the war at the time, in the immediate post-war years, and subsequently. They also probe how individual poems reveal various facets of the poetry of unease, the poetry of survival, and the poetics of war and ecology. Links to the online Oxford Classical Receptions Commentaries will enable readers to follow up their special interests. This volume differs from the shorter volume Greek and Roman Antiquity in First World War Poetry; Making Connections in that it covers the whole output of the four poets, and not just their war poems.