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Dana Burnet was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on July 3, 1888. He graduated from Cornell University in 1911. He worked as a news reporter at The New York Evening Sun, where he also published many poems. He was the author of Poems (Harper & Brothers, 1915), which includes several poems about World War I, as well as several works of prose. Burnet died in 1962.
Edward Estlin Cummings is known for his radical experimentation with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax; he abandoned traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression.
Often associated with the Imagist movement, Ford Madox Ford was the author of numerous poetry collections, including New Poems (William Edwin Rudge, 1927). He fought in World War I from 1915 to 1917 and died in 1939.
Andre Breton was born in France in 1896 and worked in psychiatric units during World War I. In 1924 he published the Surrealist Manifesto, which defines surrealism and is considered to be the beginning of the Surrealist Movement. Breton died in 1966.
English poet Rupert Chawner Brooke was born on August 3, 1887.
Arthur Davidson Ficke was born in Davenport, Iowa, in 1883. He published several poetry collections, including Tumultous Shore and Other Poems (Knopf, 1942), and served in the U.S. Army during World War I. Ficke died in 1945.
John McCrae was born on November 30, 1872. A Canadian doctor and teacher who served in World War I, he is best known for his memorial poem “In Flanders Fields.” He died on January 28, 1918.