The First World War poets didn’t just go to the trenches, get messed up and write brilliant, angry poems. They actually knew each other — or at least some of them did. Siegfried Sassoon met Rupert Brooke at a literary breakfast in Clerkenwell in 1914; next to the elegant Brooke he felt clumpy and tongue-tied. Brooke would soon be dead; Sassoon would soon be at the front, where he would meet Robert Graves, a hardened combatant. Sassoon found some of Graves’s poetry “very bad, violent, and repulsive”, but he found “real beauty”, too. Later, really messed up, Sassoon met the shell-shocked Wilfred Owen in hospital. Poignant and fascinating.
