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The Works of Wilfred Owen (Wordsworth Poetry) (Wordsworth Poetry Library)

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Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, and
Isaac Rosenberg are four English poets who enlisted
in World War I, fought in the battles, wrote about
their experiences, and chronicled the truth of what
they saw of war and death in their poems. Of the four,
Owen, Brooke, and Rosenberg were killed in action,
while Sassoon survived until 1967, when he was 80.
Of these four poets of "the Great War," perhaps
Owen is the most lyrical, tragic, and filled with
pathos. In a letter to his mother, Owen wrote
after having seen a group of Scottish troops (who
would soon be dead) and the strange look on some
of their faces: "It was not despair, or terror,
it was more terrible than terror, for it was a
blindfold look, and without expression, like a
dead rabbit's. It will never be painted, and no
actor will ever seize it. And to describe it, I
think I must go back and be with them."
The editor of this volume, Douglas Kerr, says of
Owen: "This fatal vocation to witness -- for Owen
did return to the war, and was killed at the age
of twenty-five, a week before the fighting ended --
is the basis of his reputation as the best-known
of the poets of the Great War, and one of the
outstanding English writers of modern times. All of
Owen's important work in poetry was written in
just over a year, the last year of his life, and
almost all of it is about the war. 'My subject is
War, and the pity of War', he declared. 'The Poetry
is in the pity'. But it was not to be simply a
poetry of mourning, and still less of consolation.
'All a poet can do today is warn', he went on.
'That is why the true Poets must be truthful'."
Owen deals with the issues bravely and dead
on...no flinching or side-stepping. He grapples
with the issues of the War, his questioning of
his faith, and his affectionate awareness. As
Kerr also says, "And although Owen's declared
subject was 'War and the pity of War,' we can
find glimpses of his whole life here -- his
reading, his homosexuality, his friendships, his
love of music, his philosophical doubts, and his
physical enjoyments. These poems contain all
his personal history. *** Owen was not a pacifist,
but described himself as 'a conscientious objector
with a very seared conscience'. His disgust and
compassion, his anger and his courage, have done
as much as any other individual to shape the ways
we understand and feel about modern war."
Here is the beginning of one of Owen's poems
of affection titled "Storm":
His face was charged with beauty as a cloud
With glimmering lightning. When it shadowed me
I shook, and was uneasy as a tree
That draws the brilliant danger, tremulous, bowed.
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I remember reading about Owen's poetry when looking up information on Siegfried Sasoon. While some of the poems in this collection will be too melancholic for some, there are some great poems in this volume that really make one think about passivity around issues of war and death. I especially liked "To Eros," "The Parable of the Old Man and the Young," and the few that are mentioned in Owen Knowles' excellent introduction. There are approxmately 70 pages of really good poetry here. While it really brings World War I to mind, it is very relevant to our current age's fascination with violence and war.

If you want a good introduction to Wilfred Owen's poems, get the Collected Works ISBN: 0811201325 instead.