Since its original publication over forty years ago, Brian Gardner's Up the Line to Death has established itself as a classic anthology of the poetry of the First World War
The famous - Kipling, Brooke, Sassoon, Blunden, Owen, Graves - are all here, as well as others almost entirely forgotten now. Seventy-two poets are included; twenty-one of them died in action. From the early exultation to the bitter disillusion, the tragedy of the First World War is precisely traced in the words of those who lived through it.
‘To read through this anthology … is to live the years 1914–18 adding to the images of battle, which most of us have already, the actual feelings expressed by the soldier poets who lived, and died, through trench warfare.’ Times Educational Supplement
'Mr Gardner steers his course... with skill and discrimination.'
Cyril Connolly, The Sunday Times