Category: Talks

Who chooses the War poets?

By , November 3, 2010 2:46 pm

On Tuesday 9 November, 17.30–18.30, Adrian Barlow will be giving a talk in the Library titled ‘Who Chooses the War Poets?’

The War Poets of the Great War are today a group more readily identified than the Imagists or even the Georgians, to whose ranks several of them were conscripted (‘I am held peer by the Georgians!’ announced Wilfred Owen).  How did Owen, Sassoon, Blunden, Rosenberg and Graves come to be so quickly accepted as the representative voices of their generation? What part have anthologies and their editors played in this process? And now, after two decades in which concerted efforts have been made to broaden the range of war poets and the definition of war poetry, what impact might the newly acquired Sassoon archive have on public understanding of war poetry, almost a century after the Great War?

The talk will take place in the Morison Room in the Library, and forms part of the events programme of the Friends of Cambridge University Library (http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/friends/programme.html). Entrance fee for Friends is £2.50, others £3.50, and junior members of Cambridge University can enter free. There is no pre-booking for this event, but parties of six or more are requested to notify the Secretary of the Friends in advance: friends@lib.cam.ac.uk.