Don't be too harsh on me. I'm probably just not in love with it because it is poetry.

The section "War Poems" is the best. Some of his writing on war is stunning.

Powerful and moving poetry from World War I. Must reads: Dulce et decorum set, Anthem for doomed youth, and The parable of the old man and the young.

I don’t know if it was the rainy weather or what during my trip to Maine but after reading The Silent People I decided I had not had enough depressing reading for that trip, so I started the saddest book I had brought:  The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. I remembered one or two of them from high school English and the poetry survey I took in college, especially “Dulce et Decorum Est,” which I’m pretty sure is the most famous.

This collection was very good for rounding out my picture of the man behind the poems; it has a good long introduction and timeline of  Wilfred Owen’s life and an appendix that I think was an introduction to an earlier published collection of his works, which features a lot of excerpts from his letters. This was interesting to me just as additional historical background on World War One, but it also does tie in what was going on when specific poems were being drafted, which is pretty cool. The poems themselves are split up into three segments: the first is war poetry, which is what Owen was most famous for; the second is fragments and unfinished poems; and the third is his juvenilia/pre-war poetry, which is interesting but quite frankly not as good.

The war poems are pretty harrowing. That is, after all, the point, and they are executed brilliantly. There’s not really anything new that my sheltered ass can say about them; they are correctly and widely acknowledged as being some of the best English war poems, in a war that produced a large body of excellent poetry.

Originally posted at Poems from Hell.

I'm not real big into poetry. Owen is known as one of the top military poets of WWI if not of all warfare. Poetry about such a terrible and ugly subject is interesting to say the least.

"And in his eyes
The cold stars lighting, very old and bleak,
In different skies."

I only read the war poems. Harrowing. A delicate mixture of remorse, compassion, and tenderness with a keen perception of complexity. His judgments are passionate at times, but still... mature.

Hard to rate... poetry isn't my thing.

I bought this book merely on a whim after hearing lightly of wilfred owen. One must always be weary of being poetry books without knowing a thing about the author. Although this was a "blind" buy for me it is amongst the greatest purchases i've ever made(of everything not solely books). I have to recommend this for anyone who is either trying to get into wilfred owen, you know somewhat of wilfred owen or are outright and admirer of owen. It has a simple but detailed timeline of the essential things one must know of his life and also has notes on the bottom of the pages of the different versions either changed by friends or by wilfred himself. It also hosts 2 appendix's 1 of a memoir and the other of some poetry and some pictures of Wilfred's original writings. All in all i think it a fantastic piece of literature (this is just what it contains). The Most valuable part of this book remains, and will in my humble opinion remain for good, Owen's poetry it is of the highest quality and of the greatest character to write in such a depth of death, suffering, pain and the all around brutality of war.

Some of the best poetry to come from WW1. Owen is a master, and this book, as the title says, is a full collection of his work.

The side-by-side English and French translation is perfect for the preparation of bilingual learning material.

"dulce et decorum est..."

helped me to understand what a soldier sees and know there is nothing glorious about it.