2014 marks the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of what many believed would be the war to end all wars. And while the First World War devastated Europe, it inspired profound poetry - words in which the atmosphere and landscape of battle are evoked perhaps more vividly than anywhere else.The poets - many of whom were killed - show not only the war's tragedy but the hopes and disappointments of a generation of men. In Some Desperate Glory , acclaimed historian and biographer Max Egremont gives us a transfiguring look at the life and work of eleven poets who saw action at the front. Wilfred Owen with his flaring genius; the intense, compassionate Siegfried Sassoon; the composer Ivor Gurney; Robert Graves, who would later spurn his war poems; the nature-loving Edward Thomas; the glamorous Fabian Socialist Rupert Brooke; the shell-shocked Robert Nichols; the aristocratic Julian Grenfell; Charles Sorley, whose early verse promised so much; the artist Isaac Rosenberg from London's East End; and Edmund Blunden, one of only five to survive active service. Each man's poetry is a bold act of creativity in the face of unprecedented destruction. Some Desperate Glory includes a chronological anthology of the poets' work (around 100 poems), telling the story of the war not only through the lives of these writers but through their art. This unique volume unites the poetry and the history of the war - so often treated separately - granting readers the pride, strife, and sorrow of the individual soldier's experience coupled with a panoramic view of the war's toll on an entire nation.