Three Poets of the First World War

Ivor Gurney, a gifted chorister, composer and poet, was born in 1890. His musical studies were interrupted by the war, during which he suffered a nervous breakdown in 1918. He spent the last fifteen years of his life in mental hospitals, dying of tuberculosis in 1937.Isaac Rosenberg was born in 1890 and grew up in London's East End. He studied painting at the Slade School before enlisting in the army in 1915. He was killed at the Somme in 1918. Wilfred Owen, born in 1893, grew up in Shropshire and initially hoped to become a priest. Having become disillusioned with the church, he tutored English in France, but returned to England in 1915 to enlist. He was killed at the front one week before the end of the war.Jon Stallworthy is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Oxford. He is also a Fellow and Acting President of Wolfson College, a poet, and literary critic. Jane Potter is a Senior Lecturer in Publishing at Oxford Brookes University. Her monograph is entitled Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print: Women's Literary Responses to the Great War 1914-1918 (2005).