This week marks a century since the outbreak of the first world war. Chosen from 1,000 years of English writing about war, poet and Oxford professor Jon Stallworthy selects some of the best attempts to think through this most extreme of human experiences
Read more writers' top 10s
Read more writers' top 10s
"Poetry," Wordsworth reminds us, "is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings", and there can be no area of human experience that has generated a wider range of powerful feelings than war: hope and fear; exhilaration and humiliation; hatred not only for the enemy, but also for generals, politicians, and war-profiteers; love for fellow soldiers, for women and children left behind, for country (often) and cause (occasionally).
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