Left: Void of War, Paul Nash. © 2002 Tate, London..
Anthem For Doomed Youth is a major exhibition celebrating the lives and works of 12 First World War poets and is on show at London's Imperial War Museum until April 27, 2003.
Containing work by numerous poets, the exhibition takes in the better known such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke and Robert Graves and others including Edmund Blunden, Julian Grenfell, Ivor Gurney and Charles Sorley.
Right: Wilfred Owen (1893-1918). © Imperial War Museum.
The exhibition is the largest of its kind ever mounted and is based around the lives of the poets and their experiences of the war.
Poetry became an important means of expression for those shocked and devastated by the scenes in the trenches of the Great War.
Left: manuscript of 'The Soldier', Rupert Brooke, 1914. © The Brooke Trustees.
It is difficult to imagine beauty such as is shown in some poems could arise from the First World War, or that they could find the words to describe the horrors they had witnessed. But they did, and although for most of us war seems thankfully remote, these poems somehow help to bring the reality of it home.
The Imperial War Museum is the perfect setting for the exhibition, as it undertakes to encourage an understanding of war-time experience.
Right: Chateau Wood, Ypres, October 1917. © Imperial War Museum.
Items on display include clothes, maps, a piano, sketches, letters, diaries, a lock of hair and, of course, poems and sonnets by those mentioned. Siegfried Sassoon's pistol is on show, as is an olive branch from Rupert Brooke's grave.
The exhibition is a deeply moving experience; a telegram informing Charles Sorley's father of his son's death has a profound impact and, more than ever, an exhibition such as this can be used to demonstrate the pointlessness of war.
Left: blood-stained map, returned after the death of Julian Grenfell in 1915. Reproduced with kind permission of Hertford Archives and Local Studies.
The work of the First World War poets has reached almost a century into the future and still has the ability to provoke enormous emotion.
If you want to find out more about this fascinating exhibition and the incredible young men it honours click on this link to visit the Imperial War Museum website.
