This chapter presents a survey of World War I poetry, examining in particular the aesthetic and ethical dilemmas that arise when representing war and mass death, as well as the divide between trench poetry and the modernist canon. I look at poets including Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Charles Hamilton Sorley, Edmund Blunden, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Mina Loy, T. S. Eliot, and David Jones. Reading these poets together shows, I argue, how both trench poetry and modernist verse experimented with shifts in perspective-taking that reveal dynamic renegotiations of the functions and limits of poetry
