August Stramm (29 July 1874 – 1 September 1915) was a German war poet and playwright who is considered the first of the expressionists. Stramm's radically experimental verse and his major influence on all subsequent German poetry has caused him to be compared to Ezra Pound, Guillaume Apollinaire, James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot. A reserve officer in the Imperial German Army, Stramm was called up to active service at the outbreak of World War I and was killed in action on the Eastern Front. Jeremy Adler has called August Stramm one of, "the most innovative poets of the First World War."