The years between 1914 and 1918 drew into their orbit a number of English writers who carried their literary formation into the conditions of modern warfare. Julian Henry Francis Grenfell was among them. Born in the City of Westminster in 1888, he was educated at Summer Fields School, Eton College, and Balliol College, and he served as a soldier of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland during the First World War.

Grenfell was both military personnel and a poet who worked in the English language, and he has been described as a war poet of the First World War — a writer whose work belonged to that conflict rather than to the years that preceded or followed it. His education at three successive institutions, culminating at Balliol College, placed him within a tradition of classical English learning that a number of his contemporaries in uniform also shared.

He received the Distinguished Service Order for his military service, an honour that recognized conduct in the field. Grenfell died on 26 May 1915 in Boulogne-sur-Mer. The Library of Congress records him under the dates 1888 to 1915, a span that the authority record preserves as the full extent of a life divided between soldiering and the writing of poetry in English.