The main objective of this thesis is to analyze some examples of First World War poetry regarding, on one hand, its function as propaganda and pro-war material, and on the other hand, its function as anti-war material. It demonstrates how the Great War influenced and challenged the poetic conventions of the period, but also how poetry influenced the war. The poets examined include Rudyard Kipling, Rupert Brooke, Jessie Pope, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, and Wilfred Owen. The first three of the six authors are the examples of pro-war poetry that illustrate some similar aspects of the pre-war and war poetry that is patriotic and that romanticizes the idea of war. Consequently, it is important to explore the concept of propaganda, and specifically, the occurrence of propaganda during the First World War through Peter Buitenhuis’s The Great War of Words: British, American, and Canadian Propaganda and Fiction, 1914-1933. Furthermore, various articles by authors such as Jo Fox, Alice Goldfarb Marquis and Anurag Jain will serve as a link between propaganda and literature. Meanwhile, the latter three authors are some of the more prominent authors of the Trench poetry, particularly, they are the representatives of the anti-war poetry after experiencing the horrors of the trenches. Moreover, Susanne Christine Puissant’s Irony and the Poetry of the First World War, Jon Silkin’s Out of Battle: The Poetry of the Great War, and David Punter’s Literature of Pity provide the theoretical framework for the analysis of the poems.