Favorite Poem = Dulce et Decorum Est

“And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds” (Anthem for Doomed Youth, 1917)

I initially picked this book up for I was curious about how poetry could rise from the death of one’s innocence (Owen, who was imo a literary prodigy, died ONE week before the signing of the Armistice, for what??). Well, I simply wasn’t prepared for how heartbreaking this collection would be.

“[No Man’s Land] is like the eternal place of gnashing of teeth; the Slough of Despond
could be contained in one of its crater-holes; the fires of Sodom and
Gomorrah could not light a candle to it - to find the way to Babylon the
Fallen.” “Well, I easily forget the unpleasant and I even have to write it down for future reminders, reminders of how incomparable is an innocent and quiet life at home, moneyed or moneyless, in sunshine or fog, but under an inoffensive sky, that does not shriek all night with flights of shells.

Again I have said too much…” (“Letters to Susan Owen[, His Mother]”, January 19th; February 4, 1917)

I remember times where I simply could not advance past the Front
page.
The fear in his eyes was always there greeting me;
I’d sensed mine reaching out in camaraderie.
But stopping me was the towering shame for comparing, nay desiring
his pain as mine.
Still, the fatal assault was this seizing realization that suffering so deep may very well await us,
yet neither objectivity nor fear mongering can prepare us for our own
Doom.

“After the blast of lightning from the east,
The flourish of loud clouds, the Chariot throne ;
After the drums of time have rolled and ceased
And from the bronze west long retreat is blown,

Shall Life renew these bodies ? Of a truth,
All death will he annul, all tears assuage ?
Or fill these void veins full again with youth,
And wash, with an immortal water, age ?

When I do ask white Age, he saith not so :
‘My head hangs weighted with snow.’
And when I hearken to the Earth, she saith :
‘My fiery heart sinks, aching. It is death.
Mine ancient scars shall not be glorified,
Nor my titanic tears, the seas, be dried.” (“The End”, 1916-1917)

Also, “Dolce et Decorum Est”, “Greater Love”, “Futility”, “The Next War”, “Strange Meeting” & “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young” are some of the poems I’ll never forget (& they are all available online!!)

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To future-me,

This is what I meant by “getting something else to overthink about; spent damn near 3 hours getting my thoughts together and choosing excerpts!

I don't usually read much poetry, so I'm not sure if I can provide much of an opinion. Owen's poem collection was interesting, and I agreed with the editor that his best work was in his war poetry.

However, I didn't agree with the layout that the editor chose to portray Owen's work best. Instead of putting his most mature work right after the Preface, I would suggest putting his juvenile work first, then interluding with Appendix I (that contains Owen's letters and a memoir) and only then placing his mature work. As I got acquainted with his style, it was jarring to go back to his youth poems after 100 pages of his best stuff. Moving his memoirs just before his war poems would have illustrated best what he went through at first, then how he interpreted those experiences through a poet's eyes.

As for the quality of his poems... Again, I am not a frequent poem reader, so I trusted the editor's glowing praise of Owens in the Preface. his poems were very intriguing and I think they deserve to be read aloud; they have wonderful cadence.

Reading selected poems for my book group. We're reading gay poets over a year and this is the 2nd selection. I must say I wasn't too familiar with his poetry before this. He writes really moving and lovely poems about the atrocities of war and the idiocy of believing in things like how noble it is to die for one's country. I'm sure I'm oversimplifying here, but that's my takeaway. Also, I'm keen to see how one's sexuality plays out in what one writes, but it's hard to say here. I know there are things to find when you Google "homoeroticism Wilfred Owen", but you have to dig pretty deep into interpretation to find much to go on. Some of his earlier poems and the fragments collected here seem a bit more so than the war poems. And he asked his mother to burn a big bag of poetry, which she did, so who knows what was burned? At the end of the day, I'm now keen to see or read Regeneration (Pat Barker's novel about the friendship/romance between Owen and Sassoon). And we'll be listening to Britten's War Requiem (or portions of it) at our book club meeting as all the non-Latin text in that is taken from Owen poems.

I'm giving this collection a 5/5 because there are some absolutely amazing poems in here that will stick with me for a long time, mostly the ones firmly set in WWI. Owen didn't make it out, dying (at only age 25) in November 1918, not long at all before the armistice.

The most haunting poems for me are Dulce et Decorum Est which is about a gas attack, Disabled which is about expecting valour and coming back with only injuries.

Germans he scarcely thought of, all their guilt,
And Austria's, did not move him. And no fears
Of Fear came yet. He thought of jewelled hilts
For daggers in plaid socks; of smart salutes;
And care of arms; and leave; and pay arrears;
Esprit de corps; and hints for young recruits.

The possibly most haunting is Anthem for Doomed Youth with its opening lines:

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.

I read about half of the poems and had to stop. Finished them up today. Great poems but painful to read. Some say if Wilfred Owen had lived he would have been as great as T.S. Elliot. But he didn't live because he was killed only days before the end of World War I. In his short life he captured the brutal circumstances of war, the death, the rot, and the insanity that creeps upon the soldiers and never leaves them. One poem says that poor Tim is all three--wounded, captured, and killed...because he's now insane.
I wonder often why humans haven't found another way to solve differences besides war. They called World War I "The War to End All Wars" because it was so terrible that people had to find another way to solve problems. And yet wars go on and on. Will humans ever figure out another way?

Grim and miserable, like all the other WW1 poets, but more relatable than some of the others.

"Greater Love" is maybe the best poem in this awesome book.

Absolutely beautiful. Each and every word pierces you. I'm so glad I got to read Owen's works after persistence from those around me. I don't really read a lot of poetry but when I do it affects me. It's mesmerizing, deep and soulful. Many of them are related to war though which i try not to flinch at. My favourite poem so far is probably Storm because of it's complexity while being simple and the richness of language. It's over whelming to say the least.

His face was charges with beauty as a cloud
With glimmering lightening. When it shadowed me
I shook, and was uneasy as a tree
That draws the brilliant danger, tremulous, bowed.

And happier were it if my sap consume;
Glorious will shine the opening of my heart;
The land shall freshen that was under gloom;
What matter if all men cry aloud and start,
And women hide bleak faces in their shawl,
At those hilarious thunders of my fall?

Harrowing and with a bit of the blackest humor, these poems are essential reading for anyone interested in history, WWI especially.

I have always been a fan of Owen's work and I thoroughly enjoyed the Prefix and Introduction written by C.Day Lewis. It has been beautifully crafted and I loved every second of the introduction, during which I continuously analysed the differences in language from the three time zones, 1917, 1965 and 2014. However, unfortunately the book's appendix went on too long and contained some unnecessary and confusing information which detracted from the rest of the book. As well as this, the notes beneath each poem were unclear a lot of the time and caused me to lose the meaning behind the poem.

Wilfred Owen is remembered as one of the major British "war poets" of the First World War era, alongside Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Rupert Brooke, and others. Owen had the good luck of receiving poetic counsel from Sassoon at the Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland, in which Sassoon helped him hone his monumental poem "Anthem for Doomed Youth." In the brief preface to his collected poems, Owen asserts that the object of his writings is not poetry, or especially those platitudes associated with war such as honor, gallantry, bravery, etc. but rather War itself. "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity." It is impossible to perceive Owen or his poetic achievements outside of the Great War, since he was doomed to die just days before the 1918 Armistice. What Owen might have achieved in the post-WWI era is left to musings and speculation. Instead, we are left with his collection of poems which cover the "Pity of War".

As a soldier, he had first-hand experience of the shock and awe of that period. It was his effort to mingle his strong poetic ear with the unfathomable visions he saw, and the powerful feelings those visions evoked. Even as a writer he found it difficult to conjure the words to describe the faces of men who'd lived through daily terrors, only saying they looked like the faces of dead rabbits.

In his writings, even to his loved ones, he felt no desire to sugar coat the maddening visions of the battlefield he beheld. In a letter to his mother, he writes: "I can see no excuse for deceiving you about these last four days. I have suffered seventh hell. – I have not been at the front. – I have been in front of it. – I held an advanced post, that is, a "dug-out" in the middle of No Man's Land. We had a march of three miles over shelled road, then nearly three along a flooded trench. After that we came to where the trenches had been blown flat out and had to go over the top. It was of course dark, too dark, and the ground was not mud, not sloppy mud, but an octopus of sucking clay, three, four, and five feet deep, relieved only by craters full of water . . ."

Owen characterized his poetic efforts as not despondent musings but as a warning to the future.