Some Desperate Glory: The First World War the Poets Knew - Hardcover

Max Egremont was born in 1948 and studied modern history at Oxford University. He is the author of several novels and biographies, including Siegfried Sassoon: A Life (FSG, 2005) and Forgotten Land: Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia (FSG, 2011). Egremont is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in England.

“Haunting and beautiful, the work of poets such as Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen continues to fascinate almost 100 years after the war began. . . In his new book, Some Desperate Glory, historian Max Egremont tells the stories of these half-forgotten poets.” ―Ruth Styles, The Daily Mail (UK)

“Elegant and convincing . . . Egremont's [Some Desperate Glory] is an exceptionally thoughtful treatment of 11 complicated men. He lets poignant vignettes take the place of familiar descriptions of the trenches' horrors--from Thomas, on his last night of home leave before his death, tenderly carrying his wife upstairs to bed wrapped in his greatcoat and whispering to her 'all is well between us for ever and ever" to Owen's keen distress as the 'universal perversion of Ugliness' that somehow intensified the death he was surrounded by. Above all, Egremont reminds the reader that the poems record not one amorphous war but 11 individual conflicts.” ―Michael Prodger, Evening Standard

“This is not simply another anthology of the ‘best' poetry of the Great War, though, but an attempt to tell the story of the war through its poets and explore their development through the impact of the conflict on their writing. . . Some Desperate Glory carries a punch . . . . both [Egremont's] choices and the strict chronology that he imposes on them make certain things strike home with a new freshness.” ―David Crane, The Spectator (London)

“Egremont's . . . beautifully written volume makes an ideal guide to this shifting, shadowy realm . . . On visiting Kaliningrad in the 1960s, the poet Joseph Brodsky wrote that the trees ‘whisper in German.' They don't anymore. But Egremont heard their last words.” ―Andrew Stuttaford, The Wall Street Journal on Forgotten Land