Fussell describes the lives and works of many figures, but centers on four key writers of early English Modernist literature who became productive, or who significantly changed the form of their literary work, in combat on the Western front: Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, and Siegfried Sassoon.
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In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell's landmark study of the literature of the First World War, Fussell identifies Rosenberg's "Break of Day in the Trenches" as "the greatest poem of the war."