Oxford Poetry 1915

Oxford Poetry 1915 captures a generation standing at the abyss. Published in the midst of the Great War, this collection gathers work from young men and women who would soon be scattered across the trenches of France and Flanders, some never to return. Among the contributors is a twenty-three-year-old J.R.R. Tolkien, publishing his earliest verse alongside future luminaries like Dorothy L. Sayers and Aldous Huxley. The poetry ranges from Georgian lyricism to early modernist experimentation, capturing a moment when the old world was dissolving and a new, terrible century was being born. What emerges is not merely literary history, but a fragile archive of voices that speak to us across a hundred years of aftermath. The collection endures because it preserves something irretrievable: the hopes, doubts, and raw talent of poets who wrote just before the inferno.