Today's programme of 30 First World War poems gives voice to the humanity, loss and suffering of the poets of the Great War. The selection includes Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est, W. B. Yeats’ An Irish Airman Foresees His Death and Rudyard Kipling’s Epitaphs of The War. For over 25 years Josephine Hart’s hugely popular Poetry Hours, founded originally as Gallery Poets in the West End, were presented at such celebrated venues as The National Theatre, The Donmar Warehouse, The New York Public Library and Harvard University, they now continue quarterly at the British Library and, annually, here at Hay, at London University and at The Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Josephine wrote wonderfully incisive introductions to the life and work of each poet as, like Eliot, she believed that ‘we understand the work better when we understand something of the poet’s life'.
