ABSTRACT
This book builds a narrative of twentieth-century history and poetry that is broadly chronological and necessarily selective. The intention is to focus on poetry in the glare of the events of the century, rather than in the light of aesthetic judgement, formal changes, and biographies of individual poets, though these will also be touched on. The broad sketch that I want to make in this first chapter is bounded by the accession of Edward VII at the start of the century and the early years of the reign of George V from 1910 up to World War I.
