In his latest book, Peter Kirkpatrick retrieves from Australian cultural history the compelling figure of the “ wild reciter ...

It is easy to assume that the powerful words of this young man from Shropshire captured the true experience of the war. But is that assumption right? Or has our focus on poems like Owen's ...

Perhaps he has a point - in the decades after the war, poems were anthologized, a process that disconnected the work from the events that inspired it. Depictions of specific attacks became generic ...