Thomas’s style of verse employs free association and musical concatenations. It sounds musical, but is this its sole effect as word music where sense is secondary to euphonic syntax? Philip Larkin disapproved of Thomas’s style because he felt the verse was too personalised and lacked communicative force

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Ezra Pound (1885-1972) is generally spoken of as an American writer, although he lived over half his life in Europe and declared a preference for older cultures that foster and appreciate the arts. Indeed, he found a congenial culture in Mussolinis Italy where his association with the fascist regime led to eventual incarceration in a mental asylum.

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The first Christmas decorations were the mistletoe and the holly. People all around the world, enlightened by the holiday spirit, felt the need to express their joy and decorate their homes for this special holiday.

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James Elroy Flecker was almost exactly a contemporary of Rupert Brooke. Both died in 1915 Brooke on a troopship bound for the Dardanelles and Flecker in a Swiss sanatorium. Both of them fantasised about death, Flecker more so because he was diagnosed with consumption in 1910.

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Seamus Heaney was the son of a farmer who worked 50 hectares of land and kept cattle. His mother was an Ulsterwoman who never stopped talking while his father rarely spoke. So, early in life, Seamus Heaney found himself stood between speech and silence.

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The War Poets did not come to treat war in the grand and glorious manner of Brooke, who was ignorant of the matter beyond the Iliad, and their verses gained more attention during the course of the war - in several cases after their deaths.

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History shows that religions are intrinsically violent and ineluctably push nations into war.

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