A great poet, Wilfred Owen. Quite graphic, but realistic and inspirational war poetry. think: that song, "Hero of War" by Rise against. Much the same.

Exceptional writing. A true artist who can somehow portray all emotions and elements into one. A complex yet eye opening collection of poems which really gives the raw reality of what war is actually like. The most powerful poem I found is disabled and mental cases.

“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!

Read these poems. Right now.

Read this, and other first world war poets, during my final school year. Heartbreaking, so achingly honest, wonderful writing.

I love "Strange Meeting", having visited two war-zones myself and I have an interest in war-photography.

Pretty much everyone who completed high school has read "Dulce et Decorum set," Owens' most well-knopwn contribution to 20th-century poetry, but why don't we ever cover anything else that he wrote? Sure, his early work (collected here as "Juvenalia") is a touch predictable in its mimicry of previous poets, but when read in context with the entirety of his work we can see a real progression of literary talent. I kind of wish that the editor had attempted to reconstruct a chronological presentation, since the grouping in "war poems," "juvenilia," and others is rendered useless by the inclusion of poems whose subject is clearly war in every section! I'm sure the point was to make a delineation between poems written on the Front and those written pre-war or during his convalescence, but I would have been much more satisfied to see things organized neatly by publication/writing time so we could see more of the poet's development. Clearly Owens didn't live long enough to develop much scope, but seeing his mentality towards war evolve would be extremely useful in the context of the early 20th-century mindset.

Wilfred Owen died a week before the Armistice in 1918, and he could've been forgotten like so many men, on all sides of the war, who died just before its conclusion and resolution that actually led, twenty years later, to the outbreak of an even worse conflict. But he lives on through the immortal poetry collected here, as the premier poet of the First World War.

The edition I have of "The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen" is almost pristine, with no indication that the previous owner (I bought it used, at a local bookstore) even thought of dog-earing their copy. For an edition published over sixty years ago, it's in remarkable shape. I skipped the long introduction and haven't yet reached the memoir of Owen that friend and fellow poet Edmund Blunden wrote in 1931, but I have read the poetry, especially the classic Owen poems about the war and what it was like to live and die in the trenches, and it's a moving experience. Owen emerges from the pages as a young man who craves life even as he knows it could slip away from him with one well-placed bullet or one intense artillery barrage. His poems evoke the waste of war, how it spoils not just the land but the souls of all who participate in it, even if they sustain only the slightest of physical wounds. There's a reason Wilfred Owen is regarded as probably the best of the war poets from WW1. Because he is.

poetry that just moves you to your core

I read the Penguin Classics edition of these poems by this poet who I'd never heard of. Again, a slim book of poetry that I randomly picked off of the bookshelf in my library. In the preface, Wilfred Owen warns that this is not a book about heroes, it is not about poetry. It is about War. He says he intends this as a warning and the book contains a chillingly prescient poem, entitled Next War.

From the dates below some of the poems, I understand that these poems were written in the midst of the Great War or the first World War. The Second World War did follow within two decades of this slim volume of poetry.

I have never before encountered poetry that is simultaneously tender and horrific. But that is the only way I can describe these poems. They are about the horrors of war but they are filled with deep tenderness, compassion and empathy - for the young men who went to war, for their families back home, even for the enemy soldiers who were shelling them into oblivion.

I read on Wikipedia that the poet started writing these at the age of twenty-two and that they were published posthumously after he died at the age of twenty-five. These are the only poems he wrote in his short life and these are so important. Only the good die young, they say. In one of his poems, Owen writes about bargaining for more life - that he'd rather a long rheumy old age with an ignoble death than one prematurely shortened by war. This poem is rendered even more poignant when you consider what happened to him.

At times, you know some of this is rough work - fragments of poems appear, some words are missing from poems at times. This drives home the fact that this young man didn't live long enough to see his work published -to edit it or finish it.

I'd say if you read one bit of poetry this year - make sure it's something by this man. He really is that good. He writes of shell-shocked soldiers, soldiers who've lost their sensitivity and have become killing machines, those who've returned home only to be neglected after they were crippled, he's written about their innocence and the loss of it, he's written about everything you still would see in the hearts of young people going off to war.

Like I said before, the poems are intended as a warning. I hope we manage to heed it in time.

3.5 Stars

I reread these searingly heartfelt poems just after hearing Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, with text gleaned from Owen's poetry. A more powerful argument against war does not exist on this earth.