well, this was never quite 'my' sort of poetry. I think owen is much better at writing on war than any other thing -- evenso I worry because his lines are so nice sounding and pathos filled -- I worry about the ethics of having war poetry sound so melodic (though sad).

the introduction by CDL is interesting, as the memoir by blunden. this is also quite comprehensively annotated, so the scholar would find it fairly useful.

the other thing that bugs me is owen's attitude towards women. I mean, maybe I'm being sensitive, but you don't have to be quite so nasty, or assume we're sort of inept, or not worthy of love or whatever.

I feel that CDL and blunden exaggerate owen's talents; certainly he is a fine war poet, but I am not sure he is among the best, but that's just me. he does not have sassoon's talent for irony (I suppose, that's fair though, it's not his thing) but anyway all in all I'm not quite 'inspired' (or more appropriately, distressed)

that said, he is quite enjoyable to read, and I don't regret having this around at all.

This slim volume is a real treasure house of deeply felt poetic expression. Wilfred Owen died young in combat, but left behind enough verse to qualify him as one of the true great poets of the English language. Even some of his fragments (such as "All Sounds have Been as Music") are brilliant, and his command of rhyme, rhythm, and vocabulary is second-to-none. Outside of John Keats and Clark Ashton Smith, Owen is without a doubt one of my favorite poets, and this comprehensive collection, which includes useful biographical and chronological information, is a great place to get lost in his wonderful work.

Very beautiful poems, touching and written in a very real manner. As the preface to this book says, it is a shame that he died in the war (especially that close to the end) for he surely had his best works still ahead of him. The war matured him and his poetry, which is also visible in this book due to the inclusion of many of his early poems.

My one criticism is of the book itself: following every poem there are a few annotations with excerpts from letters or different drafts, often with the corresponding line...but the lines are not numbered, so you have to count to line 16 or whatever. A bit annoying.

Other than that I found his outlook on his future oddly relatable: "he felt discouraged about his future and had no certain conviction as to what he should do with his talents. What was his vocation?"

And in a letter he writes "I am happy with Art. I believe in Science more wholeheartedly than in Art, but what good could I do in that way?"

The first Wilfred Owen poem I ever read was the first one anybody ever reads: “Dulce et Decorum est.” It was in high school, and I was already a history reading nerd by then, so I knew a bit about WWI. But when I read Owen’s poem I felt and understood the war in a way historical accounts and even All Quiet on the Western Front couldn’t convey to me. In just a few brutal lines Owen brings home the ugly brutality of a gas attack, pulling off war’s romantic mask and revealing it for what it really is. I learned about the power of poetry from Owen.

His collected works are uneven, with some poems being much better than others. The ones focusing on the war seem to be the best. They are vivid and cliche-free. They are moving, sad, angry, and eye opening. Like this one that describes what it is like to look up at the sky from the depths of a muddy trench:

Cramped in that funnelled hole, they watched the dawn
Open a jagged rim around; a yawn
Of death’s jaws, which had all but swallowed them
Stuck in the middle of his throat of phlegm.

 [And they remembered Hell has many mouths],
They were in one of many mouths of Hell
Not seen of seers in visions; only felt
As teeth of traps; when bones and the dead are smelt
Under the mud where long ago they fell
Mixed with the sour sharp odour of the shell.

Like the work of Alain-Fournier, Owen’s poems are made more powerful by the knowledge that he died in the First World War. You have to wonder what poems he would have written if he’d been given a full life.

At the end of this series of my readings about World War I, I could not omit some of the well-known anti-war poems written by soldiers at that time. Perhaps the best-known of these poets is Wilfred Owen, who fought until his tragic death just before the end of the war, and his poems are considered to be some of the best of British literature. I certainly am not the most competent to judge their value but I can say that I found many of these war poems really staggering. I was particularly impressed by the poet's ability to convey the feelings of war, the desperation of the trenches, the sense of loss, and even more so by being able to do so using such a beautiful language.

Στο τέλος αυτής της σειράς αναγνωσμάτων μου για τον πρώτο Παγκόσμιο Πόλεμο δεν θα μπορούσα να παραλείψω κάποια από τα πολύ γνωστά αντιπολεμικά ποιήματα που γράφτηκαν από στρατιώτες εκείνη την εποχή. Ίσως ο πιο γνωστός από αυτούς τους ποιητές είναι ο Wilfred Owen, που πολέμησε μέχρι τον τραγικό θάνατό του, λίγο πριν από τη λήξη του πολέμου, και τα ποιήματά του θεωρούνται μερικά από τα καλύτερα της βρετανικής λογοτεχνίας. Εγώ σίγουρα δεν είμαι ο πιο αρμόδιος για να κρίνω την αξία τους αλλά μπορώ να πω ότι βρήκα πολλά από αυτά τα ποιήματα του πολέμου πραγματικά συγκλονιστικά. Εντυπωσιάστηκα ιδιαίτερα από την ικανότητα του ποιητή να μεταφέρει τα συναισθήματα του πολέμου, την απελπισία των χαρακωμάτων, την αίσθηση της απώλειας και ακόμα περισσότερο από το γεγονός οτι μπόρεσε να το κάνει αυτό χρησιμοποιώντας τόσο όμορφη γλώσσα.

Picture this: you are a sensitive young Englishman who writes rather flowery, romantic poetry. You lead a comfortable lower-middle-class life in towns like Berkinhead and Shrewsbury. Then one day England is thrown into war. Not just any war—World War I. You become a young officer and are tossed into the horrendous killing fields of France and Belgium. Nothing could prepare you, or anyone, for the hellish nightmare of trench warfare. All your previous assumptions about life and art are jettisoned in the face of such horror. The young man is, of course, Wilfred Owen.
If his poems could take human physical form, the pre-war verses would appear in the form of a charming and gentle soul, good looking, with a rakish sense of humor and an eye for the romantic. The war poems on the other hand would appear in the form of a broken wreck, disfigured and mutilated in body and soul, with a keen eye for the utter degradation imposed on soldiers by the slaughterhouse of war. Not just war, but futile war. Wasteful war. Obscene war.
Read his war poems at your peril. A shallow glance will make you cringe. Close reading will make you ill.
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est, Pro patria mori.
Owen was killed at the front on November 4, 1918, a week before the end of the war. He was twenty-five.
The poems, harsh and uncompromising as they are, cry out to be read.

és tan visual i tan dur

The imagery from Dulce et Decorum Est will haunt me for a long time. His use of consonantal rhyme is distinctive and beautifully deployed in service to his themes.

I never knew I liked poetry. Not until I discovered the poems of Wilfred Owen. So often I’ve read poems and thought that kind of sounds nice, but I forgot the poem soon afterwards and didn’t really think about it. It’s not that I didn’t like the poem. It’s just that the poem wasn’t really striking to me. Not so with Wilfred Owen. The images he conjures are so vivid that it puts you there on the battlefield, experiencing the horrors of war. If I were to use one word to describe it then I would say it is indescribable. His poems ascend the level of poetry, beyond art even into something much grander; something that even the greatest poets can but only aspire to achieve. In addition his poetry, while all about war, is varied. We have the poem Spring Offensive which is about the soldiers and their camaraderie with nature and as the poems go on this camaraderie is increasingly threatened, until the end when the beautiful landscape so described is opened up to the rushing tides of war. The poem Anthem for Doomed Youth is perhaps one of Owen’s most lyrical poems, lamenting those lost in battle and that so many die in war that they are forgotten and he compares the fallen soldiers to slaughtered cattle. Then my favorite poem “The Show,” is a surrealist poem where the narrator is looking out from a vantage point of death at a landscape that seems to take on human features as the poem goes on, eventually culminating in a nightmarish climax. It is first of all Owen’s experiences in war that made it possible for him to write this type of poetry at all. In a hand of an author without those experiences it quite simply wouldn’t be possible. Owen’s ability with literary technique and complex use of syntax combined with his war-time experiences help to create amazingly memorable and vivid poetry.

For anyone out there that wishes to understand the effects of war in the minds of a young man, read his poem "Dulce et Decorum Est" as it is one of the greatest I have read, written in such a descriptive manner you feel as if you were the one dying in the trenches. Truly beautiful in the traumatic of it all.
Dulce Et Decorum Est read by Christopher Eccleston

Another year, another return to these extraordinary poems. Always essential, every time I come back to them I am freshly reminded of the incredible visceral power of which words are capable, even in isolation, alone, away from the augmentation of music, film, or art.

On this reading, it was the old classic, Dulce et Decorum est, that really set my spine atingle (even if I still think Strange Meeting is the special one).



——Previous Review:——

Poetry is hard to slap a meaningful star rating on, but the collected works of Wilfred Owen must surely add up to one of the Great Books of the 20th century. I come back to them every once in a while, and they never fail to put my hair on end. Owen's poems are some of the most moving artworks to come out of the World Wars, so this little book easily earns its 5 stars. It’s as prescient as 1984. There’s not much else to say about Owen's work — he says it all himself — so here are some of my favourite extracts:

‘Some cheered him home, but not as crowds cheer Goal.
Only a solemn man who brought him fruits
Thanked him; and then inquired about his soul.

Now, he will spend a few sick years in institutes,
And do what things the rules consider wise,
And take whatever pity they may dole.
Tonight he noticed how the women's eyes
Passed from him to the strong men that were whole.
How cold and late it is! Why don't they come
And put him into bed? Why don't they come?’
t
—tDisabled, 1917 (extract)

And, for my money, the masterpiece:

‘It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,—
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.

With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained;
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
“Strange friend,” I said, “here is no cause to mourn.”
“None,” said that other, “save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something had been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled.
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
Courage was mine, and I had mystery;
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.

“I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now. . . .” ’

—tStrange Meeting, 1918

There’s something so helpless and sad about the line: “I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.” It reminds me of Prince Andrei, in War & Peace, losing the strength of will to fight the terrible dark force pushing its way in from behind the door in his dream: “He seized the door, making a final effort to hold it back — to lock it was no longer possible — but his efforts were weak and clumsy and the door, pushed from behind by that terror, opened and closed again.”

Sometimes the tides of fate are too strong and no one can be blamed for not being able to fight them any longer and allowing themself to be swept away. Tolstoy saw what war really was, and so did Owen.


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I listen to Benjamin Britten's War Requiem quite a lot, which sets some of these poems to music and keeps them alive in my mind. I can therefore recite quite a lot of Owen from memory... kind of like my version of knowing the lyrics to a Beyonce song, I suppose (I'm all about my easy-going, chill-out choons, after all).

not a poetry person normally but this was amazing