The Poems of Wilfred Owen

The Poems of Wilfred Owen

Summary

The definitive single-volume edition of the work of the greatest poet of the First World War
2018 marks the centenary of the end of the First World War. This is the definitive single-volume edition of Wilfred Owen’s poems, whose death in battle a few days before the Armistice was the most disastrous loss to English letters since Keats. Containing the texts of all the finished poems of Owen’s maturity and twelve important fragments and with extensive notes, it derives from Jon Stallworthy’s monumental edition of The Complete Poems and Fragments and is aimed at the student and general reader alike.

‘Others have shown the disenchantment of war, have unlegended the roselight and romance of it, but none with such compassion for the disenchanted or such sternly just and justly stern judgment on the idyllisers.’ Guardian

About the author

Wilfred Owen

<b>Wilfred Owen</b> was born in Oswestry, a Shropshire town close to the Welsh border, on 18 March 1893. Intended first for the church, Owen finally decided at the age of 20 that literature meant more to him than evangelical religion. He was working as a tutor in France when Germany invaded Belgium and war was declared in 1914. Owen enlisted a year later, was commissioned into the 5th (Reserve) Battalion, Manchester Regiment in 1916, and crossed to France at the end of that year. By mid-1917 he was diagnosed as suffering from shellshock, and was invalided back to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland, where he met Siegfried Sassoon. He wrote some of his most powerful war poetry at the start of 1918 before he was declared fit to return to France. Owen was awarded the Military Cross for his service in the last British assaults on the German line, but he did not live to wear it or to see in print most of the poems that would make his name. In the early morning of 4th November 1918, his platoon was caught in heavy fire and Wilfred Owen was killed, only seven days before peace was declared.
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