The Poems of Wilfred Owen

By Wilfred Owen and Owen Knowles

With an Introduction and Notes by Owen Knowles, University of Hull.

In his draft Preface, Wilfred Owen includes his well-known statement 'My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity'. All of his important poems were written in just over a year, and 'Dulce et Decorum Est', 'S.I.W.', 'Futility' and 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' still have an astonishing power to move the reader. Owen pointed out that 'All a poet can do today is to warn. That is why all true Poets must be truthful'. His warning was based on his acute observation of the soldiers with whom he served on the Western Front, and his poems reflect the horror and the waste of the First World War.

This volume contains all Owen's best-known poems, only four of which were published in his lifetime. He was killed a week before the Armistice in November 1918.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wordsworth Editions
• Release date: Oct 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9781848705319

Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) was one of the leading poets of the First World War. His war poetry on the horrors of trenches and gas warfare was much influenced by his mentor Siegfried Sassoon and stood in contrast to the public perception of war at the time and to the confidently patriotic verse written by earlier war poets such as Rupert Brooke.

Book preview

The Poems of

Wilfred Owen

Introduction, bibliography and

notes by Owen Knowles

WORDSWORTH POETRY LIBRARY

This edition of The Poems of Wilfred Owen first published by Wordsworth Editions Limited in 2002

Introduction and Notes © Owen Knowles 2002

Published as an ePublication 2013

ISBN 978 1 84870 531 9

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Contents

Introduction

Notes to Introduction

Bibliography

The Poems of Wilfred Owen

On My Songs

[O World of many worlds]

Storm

Music

Maundy Thursday

To Eros

[Shadwell Stair]

From My Diary, July 1914

1914

The Unreturning

Sonnet: On seeing a piece of our heavy artillery brought into action

Happiness

Sonnet: To My Friend

The End

Greater Love

The Parable of the Old Man and the Young

Le Christianisme

At a Calvary near the Ancre

The Fates

Six o’Clock in Princes Street

The Promisers

Song of Songs

Sonnet

Sonnet: To a child

My Shy Hand

The Dead-Beat

[Fragment: All sounds have been as music]

The Letter

The Next War

Anthem for Doomed Youth

Disabled

Conscious

Dulce et Decorum Est

The Chances

Soldier’s Dream

Winter Song

Inspection

Asleep

Apologia pro Poemate Meo

Wild with All Regrets

Hospital Barge at Cérisy

Beauty

[I saw his round mouth’s crimson]

[Fragment: As bronze may be much beautified]

[Fragment: Cramped in that funnelled hole]

Miners

The Last Laugh

Insensibility

Exposure

The Show

S. I. W.

À Terre

Arms and the Boy

The Send-off

Futility

Training

Mental Cases

The Kind Ghosts

The Calls

Strange Meeting

The Sentry

Smile, Smile, Smile

Spring Offensive

Appendix: Owen’s Preface and Table of Contents

Notes to the Poems

Index of First Lines and Titles

Introduction

‘The twentieth century was the most murderous in recorded history. The total number of deaths caused by, or associated with its wars has been estimated at 187 million. . . . Taken as having begun in 1914, it was a century of almost unbroken war, with few and brief periods without organized armed conflict somewhere. It was dominated by world wars: that is to say, by wars between territorial states or alliance of states.’ [1] The First World War, in which Wilfred Owen and his contemporaries fought, provided the bloodiest imaginable first chapter in this history. With its uniquely dehumanising trench warfare, the so-called ‘Great War’ accounted for an estimated nine million combatant lives, with twice this number wounded or irreparably damaged by gas-poisoning or shell-shock. It was also accompanied at home by the first ‘modern’ manifestation of sophisticated propaganda machinery. Recruitment advertisements of 1914 blazoned out the imperative ‘Your Country Needs You!’, with the promise that the ‘war would be over by Christmas’. As carnage at the front increased, a flood of jingoistic propaganda inflamed national hatreds, brazenly presented the soldiers’ mission as a necessary patriotic sacrifice for God, King and Country [2] or, in some cases, welcomed war as a necessary blood-letting that would ‘stiffen’ the nation’s weakened character. By contrast, the popular song of the front-line soldiers combined fatalistic lament and grimly knowing pragmatism: ‘We’re here because we’re here/ Because we’re here, because we’re here . . . ’

Eric Hobsbawm’s bleak summary quoted above serves to emphasise the importance of Wilfred Owen’s legacy as one of the first of the century’s writers to testify to the magnitude of this ‘murderous’ reality and to use imaginative writing as a form of warning, prophecy and elegy. The landscapes described in Owen’s poems and letters, invariably unlocalised in place or time, recreate the phenomenon of war as literal and metaphorical no man’s land: ‘It is like the eternal place of gnashing of teeth; the Slough of Despond could not 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 . . . No Man’s Land under snow is like the face of the moon [,] chaotic, crater-ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness’ (Letter 481). [3] Even such a brief extract, with its desperate reaching for grotesque detail, indicates Owen’s awareness that modern warfare is so ‘unspeakable’ that it threatens to beggar conventional language, existing mythology and any surviving vestiges of patriotic warrior-poetry. He is the first in a long line of twentieth-century imaginative artists to realise that cataclysmic war entails a radical renegotiation of the means and ends of art itself. Thus, although Owen was no self-proclaimed Modernist – indeed he modestly aligned himself with the Georgian school of poets – he has nevertheless become an inescapable ‘modern’ presence as an elegist from the battleground, shaping the ways we understand and feel about organised war.

I

The most striking fact about Owen’s brief career as a poet is the astonishing speed of his development. This edition prints his work in approximately chronological order and so allows the reader the opportunity to follow this development from his apprentice works to his last poems, written just before he died in

Reviews for The Poems of Wilfred Owen

[therebelprince · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One hundred years after his death, Owen remains perhaps the single most tragic figure in the history of poet. He stands as a stark reminder of the sheer waste of the first World War, and a paean to the modern ideals of individuality and self-expression. Utterly heartbreaking, no matter how many times I read him.

[Guy Cabell · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I've read some of Wilfred Owen's poems before, mostly through Lord Benjamin Britten's A War Requiem. I'm glad to be able to find and read all of his other poetry. I must admit to finding some of his poems incomprehensible, but I'm not really that good with poetry, though I enjoy reading it. Lt. Owen's poems overall convey the terrible hardships of men in the grind of the trenches in the First World War, and it is unfortunate that he did not survive the war for he had many great works ahead of him that would have lasted forever in this world.

[timbazzett · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

'Tis a pitifully small collection of poems gathered here, considering Owen is often called the best of the World War I poets.His "Dulce et Decorum Est" is perhaps one of the most anthologized English poems from that era. Easily accessible, I can remember reading and pondering it when I was still in high school. That poem and several others in this slim volume still apply. Wars never really resolve anything, and yet they go on and on, as if humankind never learns anything at all. This collection is gem-like, marred only by a few incompleted fragments, and I wondered why they were even included. Probably because there were so few finished poems, a true tragedy of that war. Just twenty-five years old and only beginning to find his voice as poet, Wilfred Owen died a week before the armistice. And yet he lives on in these poems, THE WORKS OF WILFRED OWEN. An important book for any collector of serious literature.

[daedalus_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Ah fuck you war! Buy his poems. He was good. He was really, really good.