Oxford Poetry, 1917

The year is 1917. The Western Front is devouring a generation, and in the dreaming spires of Oxford, young poets are trying to capture what it means to be alive when death hangs over everything. This anthology gathers verse from Oxford students and rising literary voices during the First World War, with Dorothy L. Sayers appearing here as a young editor years before she became the queen of detective fiction. The poems range from tender meditations on love and English countryside to stark confrontations with mortality and the machinery of modern war. Some voices are confident, others halting, but all bear the weight of a world being remade by violence. What emerges is a fragile, necessary document: young artists trying to make sense of catastrophe through language, finding beauty amid destruction, hope flickering against darkness. For readers interested in how a generation at the brink of annihilation expressed its fears, loves, and questions through verse.