Background
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born on March 18, 1893 near Oswestry, England, United Kingdom. His father held a job with the railway. His mother was strict in her religious beliefs yet generous in her affections for her children.
( The very content of Owens poems was, and still is, pe...)
The very content of Owens poems was, and still is, pertinent to the feelings of young men facing death and the terrors of war. ?The New York Times Book Review Wilfred Owen was twenty-two when he enlisted in the Artists Rifle Corps during World War I. By the time Owen was killed at the age of 25 at the Battle of Sambre, he had written what are considered the most important British poems of WWI. This definitive edition is based on manuscripts of Owens papers in the British Museum and other archives.
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(By matching the paper, pencil, ink, and 24 watermarks of ...)
By matching the paper, pencil, ink, and 24 watermarks of the largely undated manuscripts with those of the poets dated letters, Professor Jon Stallworthy has been able to disentangle the complex chronology of Wilfred Owens work and reveal for the first time the overall development of the poet and successive stages in the development of individual poems and fragments. This edition is divided into two volumes to enable readers to have text, notes, and manuscript material before them at the same time. Volume I contains an introduction, a biographical table, the text of 110 poems (many with important new readings), and supporting factual and critical notes. Volume II provides the basis for the text of the poems, reproducing many of the manuscripts and the fragments, annotated like the poems. The manuscripts and fragments are reproduced in type-set transcription, showing Owens reworkings and alterations.Together with these volumes present more than twice the number of poems and fragments hitherto available, and comprise the most comprehensive and detailed edition of a twentieth-century poet writing in the English language. It is a worthy monument to a man who lived to see only four of his poems in print, but whose work is now known throughout the English-speaking world, and indeed beyond it as the text of Benjamin Brittens great War Requiem. Updated, in both look and content, and handsomely packaged, this two volume, slip-cased hardback edition is an invaluable insight into the process of composition for one of our most important war poets, and would make the perfect gift for the Wilfred Owen completist.
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(This collection contains the complete poetic works of Wil...)
This collection contains the complete poetic works of Wilfred Owen, published in chronological order - 143 Poems in total. It has been carefully formatted for clarity of viewing, and includes a Preface by the Author, and and Introduction by the celebrated war poet Siegfried Sassoon, who was a friend and contemporary of Wilfred Owen. The collection contains the following poems: 1. To Poesy 2. Written in a Wood, September 1910 3. My Dearest Colin 4. Sonnet 5. Lines Written on my Nineteenth Birthday 6. Supposed Confessions of a Secondrate Sensitive Mind in Dejection 7. O Believe That God Gives You all that He Promises 8. Little Claus and Big Claus 9. The Rivals 10. A Rhymed Epistle to E.L.G. 11. The Dread of Falling into Naught 12. Science had Looked, and Sees No Life But This: 13. The Little Mermaid 14. The Two Reflections 15. Deep Under the Turfy Grass and Heavy Clay 16. Unto What Pinnacles of Desperate Heights 17. Impromptu 18. Sonnet- (Daily I Muse on Her) 19. But it is not Enough to Look Upon a Rolling Main 20. Uriconium 21. When Late I Viewed the Gardens of Rich Men 22. Long Ages Past in Egypt Thou Wert Worshipped 23. O World of Many Worlds, O Life of Lives 24. The Time was Aeon; and the Place All Earth 25. Nocturne 26. Impromptu: Now, Let Me Feel 27. A Palinode 28. It Was a Navy Boy, So Prim, So Trim 29. Whereas Most Women Live This Difficult Life 30. A New Heaven 31. The Storm 32. To The Bitter Sweet Heart: A Dream 33. Roundel 34. How Do I Love Thee? 35. The Fates 36. Happiness 37. Song of Songs 38. Has Your Soul Sipped 39. The Swift 40. Inspection 41. With an Identity Disc 42. The Promisers 43. Music 44. Anthem For Doomed Youth 45. Winter Song 46. Six O'Clock in Princes Street 47. The One Remains 48. The Sleeping Beauty 49. The City Lights Along the Waterside 50. Autumnal 51. The Unreturning 52. Perversity 53. Maundy Thursday 54. The Peril of Love 55. The Poet In Pain 56. Whither is Passed the Softly-Vanished Day 57. On My Songs 58. To - - 59. To Eros 60. 1914 61. Purple 62. On A Dream 63. Stunned by Their Life's Explosion Into Love 64. From My Diary, July 1914 65. The Ballad of Many Thorns 66. I Saw his Round Mouth's Crimson Deepen as it Fell 67. Apologia Pro Poemate Meo 68. Le Christianisme 69. Hospital Barge 70. Sweet is Your Antique Body, Not Yet Young 71. Page Eglantine 72. The Rime of the Youthful Mariner 73. Who is the God of Canongate? 74. My Shy Hand 75. At a Calvary Near the Ancre 76. Miners 77. The Letter 78. Conscious 79. Schoolmistress 80. Dulce Et Decorum Est 81. A Tear Song 82. The Dead-Beat 83. Insensibility 84. Strange Meeting 85. Sonnet on Seeing a Piece of Our Heavy Artillery Brought into Action 86. Asleep 87. Arms and the Boy 88. The Show 89. Futility 90. The End 91. S.I.W. 92. The Calls 93. Training 94. The Next War 95. Greater Love 96. The Last Laugh 97. Mental Cases 98. The Chances 99. The Send-Off 100. The Parable of the Old Man and the Young 101. Disabled 102. A Terre 103. The Kind Ghosts 104. Soldier's Dream 105. I Am the Ghost of Shadwell Stair 106. Elegy in April and September 107. Exposure 108. The Sentry 109. Smile, Smile, Smile 110. Spring Offensive 111. Before Reading a Biography of Keats for the First Time 112. Consummation is Consumption 113. Within Those Days 114. Handling Upon the Fairy-Strange Enchantments 115. Full Springs of Thought Around me Rise 116. At Dawn, I Love to Stray Upon the Meeting-Line 117. The West! I Dare Not Pass into the West 118. Sonnet: When I Perceive by Watching 119. Spring Not, Spring Not in my Wild Eyes, O Tears 120. Impressionist 121. O, Jesus, Now Thine Own Self Speaking 122. Eve of St. Mark 123. Why Should the Anguish of Leaving Those We Love 124. How do the Heavens Rule my Moods! 125. Tis But Love's Shadow - That So Haunts my Thought 126. Hearts and Tarts - plus more there is no room to list here - 143 in total.
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(In his draft Preface, Wilfred Owen includes his well-know...)
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.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1853264237/?tag=2022091-20
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born on March 18, 1893 near Oswestry, England, United Kingdom. His father held a job with the railway. His mother was strict in her religious beliefs yet generous in her affections for her children.
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was educated at the Birkenhead Institute and at Shrewsbury Technical School (now The Wakeman School)
Although he lived only 25 years, the British poet Wilfred Owen became one of the most well known of the War Poets, a school of English lyricists who wrote of their experiences and impressions during World War I.
A shortage of money for tuition fees eventually forced Owen to withdraw from University College, Reading, however, and in 1911 he sought work at a vicarage in Dunsden, a town near Reading.
There he lived for 18 months as a pupil and lay assistant to Reverend Herbert Wigan.
During a bout with depression, Owen suffered a physical and emotional collapse that put an end to his stay at Dunsden.
In February 1913 he recuperated at home in Shrewsbury, where he remained for six months.
By September he had taken a position teaching English at the Berlitz School in Bordeaux, France.
In the summer of 1914, he worked for a family at Bagneres de Bigorre in the Pyrenees, where he met the French poet Laurent Tailhade.
By December, he had returned to Bordeaux to tutor for an expatriate British family.
During his time abroad he had gone home only to visit, but talk of war eventually drew him back to England.
By autumn, Owen had begun his training with the 3/ 28th London Regiment, later known as the 2nd Artists Rifles Officers Training Corps.
After serving in this capacity for eight months, he was commissioned into the 2nd Battalion Manchester Regiment at Milford Camp, near Witley.
More than a year later, in October 1917, he would write the poem "Dulce et Decorum Est, " in which an episode with lethal gas sends soldiers into " an ecstasy of fumbling, / Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time. "
Months would pass before Owen began to acquire the intimate knowledge of war that he would bring to his poetry.
In total, he completed 14 months of training, including a musketry course that he took at Mychett Camp in Farnborough in July 1916.
Classified as 1st-Class Shot at the end of the course, he rejoined the Manchesters at Witley Camp later in the summer.
It was not until January 1917 that his regiment was drafted to the Infantry Base Depot at Etaples, France.
Though Owen did not remain on the front line, he and his men embarked on a risky mission to occupy a former German bunker in No Man's Land.
An incident there, in which a sentry that he had posted was blinded during a bombardment, later became the subject of his poem "The Sentry. "
Owen was beginning to amass the difficult experiences that he would write about so compellingly.
After a month of combat, Owen was sent to join a Transport Officers' Course at Abbeville.
It was a coveted position, safely away from the front line.
In Abbeville he stayed in a house that lacked heat, and his milk and other goods froze, but that did not deter him from writing such poems as "Exposure" and "Happiness. "
But Owen's sojourn in Abbeville was brief, and he returned to his battalion on March 1. Shortly thereafter, on March 14, he suffered a concussion from a fall and was sent home.
He soon recovered and returned to the line.
Yet he was again unwell by May 1917, and was diagnosed as being a victim of shell shock and trench fever.
After being treated at a casualty clearing station, he returned to England for further care, first at Netley Hospital in Hampshire, and later at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh.
It was while recovering at the hospital in Edinburgh that Owen met Siegfried Sassoon, an army captain and an established poet who wrote passionately of his experiences in the war.
Sassoon admired the younger writer's poetry and encouraged him to keep going, pushing him to further develop his style.
At first Sassoon's influence was perhaps too strong, and Owen began to write poetry that echoed his contemporary's style.
But he soon found his own unique approach to writing about the war; his style matured, as did his characteristic use of such techniques as pararhyme, alliteration, and assonance.
Meeting Sassoon sparked a bout of creativity in Owen, who had begun penning his finest verses during his recuperation at Edinburgh. When he was able to take time away from his clerical duties, the poet escaped to his room to write.
This was a productive period for Owen, in which he wrote and rewrote such poems as "Strange Meeting, " "Futility, " and "Mental Cases. "
Two months later Sassoon returned from battle severely wounded, and Owen was able to visit him in the hospital.
Their reunion was brief, as Owen was to go off once again to the war in France, rejoining the 2nd Manchesters as an officer reinforcement in September 1918.
It did not take long for Owen to become reacquainted with the horrors of war.
His battalion was to advance upon the Beaurevoir-Fonsomme Line, originally known as the Hindenburg Support Line.
When the 2nd Manchesters launched their attack on October 1, 1918, they successfully challenged the enemy's defenses. Owen was one of a number of men who captured a German gun position and resisted a harsh counter-attack, advancing to the farthest point occupied by the British along the western front. In his last letter to his mother, written not far from the canal, in the basement of a house in Pommereuil, Owen assured her that he was happy and, at least momentarily, safe. News of Owen's death did not reach his home at Shrewsbury until November 11, the day that marked the end of the Great War. The poetry was all that remained, and the poet's admirers were determined to see them published. Often paired with Sassoon as the greatest of Britain's War Poets, Owen lives on in his verse, which chronicles the experience of war without sentimentality and empty paeans to heroism.
(By matching the paper, pencil, ink, and 24 watermarks of ...)
( The very content of Owens poems was, and still is, pe...)
(This collection contains the complete poetic works of Wil...)
(In his draft Preface, Wilfred Owen includes his well-know...)