Manning was born in 1882 in Sydney, Australia, and whose father was a one-time mayor. Educated privately, he was thereafter sent to England to complete his studies. In the immediate pre-war years Manning established a reputation as a minor poet and critic among a small circle of intimates. With the outbreak of war in August 1914 Manning enlisted as a Private with the 7th Battalion King's Shropshire Light Infantry, serving in the trenches in France among some of the more bloody battles of the war. In 1929 Manning anonymously published in a private edition his novelised memoirs of the war, The Middle Parts of Fortune, in two volumes. In place of his name he simply listed his army serial number. The following year, 1930, an expurgated edition of the book was commercially published as Her Privates We - without the strong language deemed likely to offend a wider readership. Manning wrote no more fiction, retiring instead into scholarly seclusion. He died in London in 1935; it was a further eleven years before he was finally identified as the author of the war classic hailed by Hemingway as "the finest and noblest book of men in war I have ever read". T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) observed that "no praise could be too sheer for this book ... it justifies every heat of praise. Its virtues will be recognised more and more as time goes on."

Though his creative output was cut tragically short Charles Hamilton Sorely is among the most acclaimed of the Great War Poets. Born in Aberdeen, Scotland he was educated first at Marlborough College, and then briefly at the University of Jena. It was there his studies were interrupted in August, 1914 by the outbreak of the First World War. After leaving Germany he enlisted in the Suffolk Regiment and was deployed to the Western Front as a lieutenant May, 1915. He was promoted to captain three months later and during the Battle of Loos was felled by a sniper's bullet. His final sonnet: "When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead" was discovered in his kit after his death, and was published posthumously with his other completed work. Marlborough and Other Poems was published posthumously in January 1916 and immediately became a critical success, with six editions printed that year. His Collected Letters, edited by his parents, were published in 1919. Poet Laureate John Masefield considered him the greatest poetical loss of the war. Robert Graves wrote a poem in tribute to him entitled: "Sorely's Weather." In 1986 Sorley was commemorated along with 15 other poets of the Great War by a plaque bearing his name in Westminster Abbey.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. Philip Edward Thomas was an Anglo-Welsh writer of prose and poetry. He is commonly considered a war poet, although few of his poems deal directly with his war experiences. Already an accomplished writer, Thomas turned to poetry only in 1914. He enlisted in the army in 1915, and was killed in action during the Battle of Arras in 1917, soon after he arrived in France. His Works: Poetry collections: Six Poems, under pseudonym Edward Eastaway, Pear Tree Press, 1916. Poems, Holt, 1917. Last Poems, Selwyn & Blount, 1918. Collected Poems, Selwyn & Blount, 1920. Two Poems, Ingpen & Grant, 1927. The Poems of Edward Thomas, R. George Thomas (ed), Oxford University Press, 1978 Poemoj (Esperanto translation), Kris Long (ed & pub), Burleigh Print, Bracknell, Berks, 1979. Edward Thomas: A Mirror of England, Elaine Wilson (ed), Paul & Co., 1985. The Poems of Edward Thomas, Peter Sacks (ed), Handsel Books, 2003. The Annotated Collected Poems, Edna Longley (ed), Bloodaxe Books, 2008. Fiction: The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans (novel), 1913 Essay collections: Horae Solitariae, Dutton, 1902. Oxford, A & C Black, 1903. Beautiful Wales, Black, 1905. The Heart of England, Dutton, 1906. The South Country, Dutton, 1906 (reissued by Tuttle, 1993). Rest and Unrest, Dutton, 1910. Light and Twilight, Duckworth, 1911. The Last Sheaf, Cape, 1928.

Isaac Rosenberg is widely recognised as one of the finest English poets of the First World War. Born into a working class Jewish family, at the age of seven Rosenberg moved from Bristol to a strongly Jewish area of East London. At fourteen he left school to become an apprentice engraver, but at the outbreak of the Great War he was living in South Africa with his sister in the hope that a warm climate would do his chronic bronchitis some good. Critical of the war from the outset, he nevertheless joined up in 1915. He was killed near the Somme on the Western Front in 1918. He is currently commemorated as one of 16 Great War Poets in Westminster Abbey.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the goodreads data base. Wilfred Edward Salter Owen MC was an English poet and soldier, one of the leading poets of the First World War. His shocking, realistic war poetry on the horrors of trenches and gas warfare was heavily influenced by his friend Siegfried Sassoon and stood in stark contrast to both the public perception of war at the time, and to the confidently patriotic verse written earlier by other war poets such as Rupert Brooke. Among his best-known works—most of which were published posthumously—are "Dulce et Decorum Est", "Insensibility", "Anthem for Doomed Youth", "Futility" and "Strange Meeting".

Sir Herbert Edward Read, DSO, MC was an English anarchist poet, and critic of literature and art, also published as Herbert Read. He was the publisher and editor-in-chief of Jung's collected works in English.

Ford Madox Ford, born Ford Hermann Hueffer, was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals, The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, were instrumental in the development of early 20th-century English literature. Ford Madox Ford was the author of over 60 works: novels, poems, criticism, travel essays, and reminiscences. His work includes The Good Soldier , Parade's End , The Rash Act, and Ladies Whose Bright Eyes. He collaborated with Joseph Conrad on The Inheritors, Romance, and other works. Ford lived in both France and the United States and died in 1939.

Charlotte Mary Mew was a modernist British poet. Mew's father, architect Frederick Mew, died in 1898 without making adequate provision for his family; two of her siblings suffered from mental illness, and were committed to institutions, and three others died in early childhood leaving Charlotte, her mother and her sister, Anne. Charlotte and Anne made a pact never to marry for fear of passing on insanity to their children. In 1894, Mew succeeded in getting a short story into The Yellow Book, but wrote very little poetry at this time. Her first collection of poetry, The Farmer's Bride, was published in 1916. Mew gained the patronage of several literary figures, notably Thomas Hardy, who called her the best woman poet of her day, Virginia Woolf, who said she was "very good and quite unlike anyone else," and Siegfried Sassoon. She obtained a small Civil List pension with the aid of Cockerell, Hardy, John Masefield and Walter de la Mare. This helped ease her financial difficulties. After the death of her sister, she descended into a deep depression, and was admitted to a nursing home where she eventually committed suicide by drinking Lysol. Mew is buried in Hampstead Cemetery.

Edward Godfree Aldington was an English writer, poet, translator, critic, and biographer. He joined the British Army in 1916 and was wounded in 1918. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard\_...

Robert von Ranke Graves (1895-1985), born in Wimbledon, received his early education at King's College School and Copthorne Prep School, Wimbledon & Charterhouse School and won a scholarship to St John's College, Oxford. While at Charterhouse in 1912, he fell in love with G.H. Johnstone, a boy of fourteen ("Dick" in Goodbye to All That) When challenged by the headmaster he defended himself by citing Plato, Greek poets, Michelangelo & Shakespeare, "who had felt as I did". At the outbreak of WWI, Graves enlisted almost immediately, taking a commission in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He published his first volume of poems, Over the Brazier, in 1916. He developed an early reputation as a war poet and was one of the first to write realistic poems about his experience of front line conflict. In later years he omitted war poems from his collections, on the grounds that they were too obviously "part of the war poetry boom". At the Battle of the Somme he was so badly wounded by a shell-fragment through the lung that he was expected to die, and indeed was officially reported as 'died of wounds'. He gradually recovered. Apart from a brief spell back in France, he spent the rest of the war in England. One of Graves' closest friends at this time was the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who was also an officer in the RWF. In 1917 Sassoon tried to rebel against the war by making a public anti-war statement. Graves, who feared Sassoon could face a court martial, intervened with the military authorities and persuaded them that he was suffering from shell shock, and to treat him accordingly. Graves also suffered from shell shock, or neurasthenia as it is sometimes called, although he was never hospitalised for it. Biographers document the story well. It is fictionalised in Pat Barker's novel Regeneration. The intensity of their early relationship is nowhere demonstrated more clearly than in Graves' collection Fairies & Fusiliers (1917), which contains a plethora of poems celebrating their friendship. Through Sassoon, he also became friends with Wilfred Owen, whose talent he recognised. Owen attended Graves' wedding to Nancy Nicholson in 1918, presenting him with, as Graves recalled, "a set of 12 Apostle spoons". Following his marriage and the end of the war, Graves belatedly took up his place at St John's College, Oxford. He later attempted to make a living by running a small shop, but the business failed. In 1926 he took up a post at Cairo University, accompanied by his wife, their children and the poet Laura Riding. He returned to London briefly, where he split with his wife under highly emotional circumstances before leaving to live with Riding in Deià, Majorca. There they continued to publish letterpress books under the rubric of the Seizin Press, founded and edited the literary journal Epilogue, and wrote two successful academic books together: A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) and A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928). In 1927, he published Lawrence and the Arabs, a commercially successful biography of T.E. Lawrence. Good-bye to All That (1929, revised and republished in 1957) proved a success but cost him many of his friends, notably Sassoon. In 1934 he published his most commercially successful work, I, Claudius. Using classical sources he constructed a complexly compelling tale of the life of the Roman emperor Claudius, a tale extended in Claudius the God (1935). Another historical novel by Graves, Count Belisarius (1938), recounts the career of the Byzantine general Belisarius. During the early 1970s Graves began to suffer from increasingly severe memory loss, and by his eightieth birthday in 1975 he had come to the end of his working life. By 1975 he had published more than 140 works. He survived for ten more years in an increasingly dependent condition until he died from heart failure.