Perhaps more than any other vocation, the poet’s is full of wrangling and jockeying for position. The financial rewards are few and rare, yet the competition is intense. Warlike.

Herein are some of the most entertaining and key literary wars waged between 1919 and 1939, constructed from fragments of a broken landscape of letters and biographies.

The protagonists and antagonists include; T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Siegfried Sassoon, W.H. Auden, Edith & Osbert & Sacheverell Sitwell, Roy Campbell, Cecil Day-Lewis, Stephen Spender, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, Rebecca West, Vita Sackville-West, Humbert Wolfe, Virginia & Leonard Woolf, Noel Coward, George Moore, Victor Gollancz, Pamela Frankau, Thomas Hardy, John Gawsworth, T.E. Lawrence, James Joyce, Nancy Cunard and Stephen Tennant.

Many were born in the 1880s, e.g. Wyndham Lewis, Humbert Wolfe, Siegfried Sassoon, Edith Sitwell & T.S. Eliot, and were in the Modernist and the Bloomsbury Groups who attacked the comfortable Georgian poets and their uncritical nostalgic love of early twentieth century rural England.

And what of their tactics. Some, like Rebecca West, criticised a person's character. Others, like Humbert Wolfe criticised a person's work. Others still, like Wyndham Lewis, criticised both.

Our remit is not to see if the pen was mightier than the sword (or rather the gun). Nor is it to see who won the war of the poets. Take the battle between Humbert Wolfe and Siegfried Sassoon - a literary skirmish that was just one of many. Sassoon attacked Humbert but both won. Sassoon is remembered for his historical war poems and won the war of the soldier in history and death. But whilst Humbert is largely forgotten he was a best seller of the 1920s and won the war of the lover in the moment.

To an extent all poets lost the war of the poets as the Great War that had destroyed the world marked the beginning of the end of their cultural dominance. In that earlier world they had read and published each other and appointed themselves the learned greats that the public should love. They had been the winners.

These poets were not democratic and dependent on their public. They weren’t judged on sales because they could live off their inheritances. They were both dictators and entertainers. Masters over the reader but needy of the readers’ praise. However, when Eliot became the leader of this elite he destroyed notions of the English poet. He was the American, English Gentleman who fulfilled British culture whilst American popular culture drowned it out with cinema. The end of the writer was the victory of Hollywood and Eliot was the Trojan Horse, the Cuckoo who destroyed the cultural nest.

And whilst cinema removed the popularity of the poets it also harnessed their power as writers of wartime propaganda, in a heady combination of cinema, jingoism and art. And although most came to support the British many poets had initially supported Hitler and Franco and others Stalin and the Communists.

So imagine sitting with me in my study. Books piled high beside me and a bookcase full behind me. Occasionally I will pull one from the shelf to burnish a quote. Now, please make yourself comfortable and have a drink whilst we begin…