Laurence Binyon was a celebrated poet and art historian, who was a friend
of both T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Although over-age for military service
in 1914, Binyon volunteered to serve on the front line as a medical
orderly, an experience that directly informed his writing. Poems of Two
Wars brings together for the first time the remarkable poems he wrote about
both World War I and World War II. Binyon's 1914 poem "For the Fallen" is
considered by many to be the single most famous poem written about World
War I, and the poem is still read at remembrance services and carved onto
thousands of war memorials. But Binyon's writings during the wars are
substantial and as moving as his most well known works. Binyon not only
wrote compelling poems about his time working in a battlefield hospital in
France, but during World War II he penned some of the most powerful poems
about the war written by a non-combatant, including "The Burning of the
Leaves." Poems of Two Wars reveals the scope and intensity of Binyon's work
and finally gives him his due as a skilled poet of some of history's most
violent conflicts.