Very briefly?

• While their suffering was certainly real and we don't want to diminish them at all...they were by no means to be taken as the 'standard' response to the war.

The fact is is that significant amounts of men did not fight in horribly tragic battles, many men did not even see the front line trenches at all or even any trenches whatsoever. Many men who went to the front have distinctly positive experiences with it, yes, even men who were injured. For every primary source you can drop of me of someone saying post-war about how horrible and useless it all was I'll drop you one of someone going what a jolly good show it was and what an adventure it was. Find me someone in the Northern sector of the first day of the Somme and you'll find a man who hates Haig with a passion find me one in the Southern sector and you got one who is having a blast walking over those German positions.

It's why works like Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel isn't popular and read in every High School in America but Erich Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front is; the former is a German perspective which has a distinctly positive memory of the war while the latter fits in line with this common trope of 'the war was useless, everything was useless, realism blah blah'. While that is useful to people talking about cultural history (and it really, really is as it did paint an entire generation) in terms of military and social history of the First World War it is misleading; it creates inherent bias' before you even go into it with the assumption that the entire war 'had no point' and that the Generals were stupid and it was total horror for every single person involved.

• Most important of all their understanding of the war was inherently limited.

They were frontline riflemen. They were grunts. They do not understand strategic and operational complexity. Someone who fought in the Somme would see the cavalcade of human suffering around them and wonder 'why are we doing this' but we can know with retrospect it was the turning point of the war which made the Germans all but abandon the Western Front. The fact is we can not use their understanding to make grand statements about the state of the war or even the state of the tactics used. They don't see the grand scheme of things like we do in 2015 they just know their buddy got blown up in an artillery barrage and they went mad after a week of bombardment on their sector. They don't care about fancy strategic pressure or stormtrooper tactics or whatever they just care about the fact that all their friends are dead.

Again, that is not to minimize their losses or their experience -- it was very real and I am sympathetic to it but if we're speaking from a strictly academic standpoint it needs to be held in balance with other viewpoints even if they aren't the vogue narrative about the war.

In The Great War: Myth and Memory by Dan Todman there is actually an entire chapter on these 'war poets', I'd highly suggest this book for really this entire subject as it covers it comprehensively.