Wilfred Owen was the greatest poet of the First World War - his best work is collected here, published in a new hardback edition to commemorate the end of the war that Owen has taught us never to forget
Wilfred Owen 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.
Jon Stallworthy was born in 1935. He was Professor Emeritus of
English at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of Wolfson College,
of the British Academy, and of the Royal Society of Literature. He
published eight books of poetry, as well as translations from the
Russian of poems by Alexander Blok and Boris Pasternak, and
prize-winning biographies of Louis MacNeice and Wilfred Owen.
Professor Stallworthy died in November 2014.
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, 1920*
For me, he is the greatest of all the war poets.... it is Owen's
intense respect for the soldier that makes his poetry so powerful.
Those who did not return have their meticulously maintained stone
memorials on the fields of Flanders. But their memorial in our
minds is largely built by Wilfred Owen
*Spectator*
The greatest of all the War Poets… This edition…is a must for every
poetry lover
*Independent*
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