Wilfred Owen Books

Here in this book you will find some of the finest poetry that any author from Britain has ever produced. Owen writes with style and uses words in such a beautiful way that one can only wonder how he was able to do it. His non-war poems are just as astounding as his war poems and this collection is great for any reader of poetry. Highly recommended, this book will not dissapoint.

I was first exposed to the poems of Wilfred Owen in high school and it has had a lasting inpact on my appreciation of poetry and the horrors of war. The imagery that Owen uses in his classic Dolce et Decurum est about the callacousness and futility of modern warefare leaves one with both awe and disgust, especially when concluded by the saying sweetness and honor is to die for one's country. Tragically whose knows what Owen might have produced had he lived longer.

Seeing a posting for a new biography of Wilfred Owen reminded me to return to this anthology of his poems. Every war has produced great poets and WWI was fixed in our minds by the sensitive words of Siegfried Sassoon and especially Wilfred Owen. Writing from the trenches Owen managed to keep his eyes and mind and heart wide open while he witnessed the horrid plunder that surrounded him.. That he was able to transpose these experiences into the transcendentally beautiful poems that fill this book is a major wonder. Yes, WWII had WH Auden et al and the hungry monster machine of war was again made into words. And poets wrote of Korea, of Vietnam, and other countries' poets wrote of other wars. But again the threats and facts cloud our lives and world, and their words seemingly fall on deaf ears. Would that we could take heed of the poems of such perfection as those here by Wilfred Owen. This is the time to study this book........daily.

War and poetry- two concepts infrequently mentioned, much less allied, in the same breath. Yet during World War I a number of writers took the horrific experiences of the Western Front and turned them into some of the twentieth century's finest, most disturbing poetry. Among these "war poets", Wilfred Owen is indisputably one of the greatest.

From the opening declaration " Above all, I am not concerned with Poetry... My subject is War, and the pity of War..." through the dreamlike madness of "Strange Meeting" to the elegiac fury of "Anthem for Doomed Youth", Owen hones the poetic craft he learned as a juvenile romantic versifier into a rapier on which he skewers the futility of the war, the blind official stupidity which kept it going, and the inhumanity shown by each side to its own men as well as the enemy.

Killed in action not long before the Armistice, Owen saw little publication of his work. However, his verse- carefully arranged, meticulously researched and documented by Cecil Day Lewis- is not only his epitaph. As relevant and affecting today as in 1918, it's as fine a counter-argument as any ever written against those who dismiss poetry as flowery nonsense. And for the rest of us? Few media can express the true nature and terrible costs of the First World War as eloquently as poetry at its finest can- and Owen provides it in plenty.

This is a wonderful book, and one of the most powerful collections of anti-war poems ever put together. Wilfred Owen was not a man who was describing war from the safety of his own home. He was in the thick of it, and he paid the ultimate price.

'Anthem for Doomed Youth' may just be the most powerful of all anti-war poems, and it was voted 8th in a list of Britain's favourite poems in a BBC poll. This poem like Owen's work generally is written in an unpretentious style. His poetry is very moving, but without being sentimental. He's painting pictures with words, and the pictures aren't pretty.

All his renowned work is here, including 'Dulce et Decorum est', 'Disabled', and 'Mental Cases'. The notes are very interesting, as you'd expect from a literary heavyweight like C. Day Lewis, and there's also some of Owen's non war poetry, but that's still bleak!

If you want to buy any book of Owen's work, I'd recommend this one for starters.

I have loved Wilfred Owen's poetry since school days.His exquisite use of language vividly conjures up the horrors of war where young men had no choice in their fate and highlighted the social context in which WWW1 took place. Very moving.

Indeed, this is a book not to be missed by those who love poetry. Owen's verses are mostly gut-wrenching lines that will burn images in your brain, but that is good, particularly next to other poems that we may have been familiar with, where the idea of war is an "ideal" and soldiers are knights who know no fear, who are immune to death and pain. Owen's war is different: the men die like rats in the trenches, in their own vomit, and glory and honor are not enough to protect agaist mustard gas. That the poet perished in that war is only a final irony in the short life of a sensitive man who saw too much in too short a time. Excellent.

This touching collection of poetry stems from the horrors of Owen's own experiences at the front. From his grim, visual and detailed description of a man dying of poison gas, to his conspiracy theories of the real reasons behind the war, Owen uncovers the old lie and disproves it right before our eyes: Dulce et Decorum est Pro Patria Mori...

There's not much that can be said about Wilfred Owen that shouldn't have already been said. Yet the life of this brilliant poet, which was cut short just before the armistice that ended World War I, remains unknown to far too many. Wilfred Owen is referred to as a "soldier-poet" of WWI, which includes him in the company of such literary standards as Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon. But, as perhaps the greatest poet among the three, he is the least known. Dominic Hibberd's new biography will hopefully set that to rights.

I first fell in love with Wilfred Owen's poetry when I read "Dulce et Decorum est." I found his imagery real and terrifying as it spoke to the true brutality and horrors of "modern" warfare. (The poem is a description of a soldier dying in a gas attack.) Throughout the years I have read much on WWI and on the soldier-poets, but nothing has come as close to so vividly portraying the life of one of them as Hibberd's new biography.

Hibberd begins his very thorough telling of Owen's life, starting with his familial background and youth, and working his way through Owen's years as a parish assistant and his numerous attempts to gain a university education. It seems a long time before we are to encounter Wilfred as a soldier, but Hibberd builds a solid base that explains Wilfred's personality and his attitude towards poetry. Owen's devoutly Evangelical mother had wished her son to enter the service of the church, but after his time in Dunsden, Owen found it increasingly hard to reconcile his Christian faith with his love of literature, finding the two to oppose each other. His one desire in life was to be a poet, and upon entering the English army, he probably had no idea that his voice would come through war. Only a few of Owen's poems (five) were published in his lifetime and after his untimely death, his poetry was collected and published in the 20s and 30s. Afterwards, he seems to disappear entirely from the literary map until a renewed interest in his work arose in the 1960s; an appropriate time since another "war to end all wars" was being fought in Vietnam.

The one area of dicord I take with this biography concerns Owen's sexuality. In the book jacket, and several times throughout the book, Hibberd states that Owen was a homosexual. This is evidently shown through his connections with various personages who were homosexuals, including his friend and mentor, fellow soldier and poet, Siegfried Sassoon. While I don't doubt that this was the truth regarding Owen's sexuality, Hibberd seems a little over-insistent with too little to back it up. Yet perhaps this is due to the inconsistencies that exist in the mystery surrounding Wilfred Owen. Hibberd makes it known that much was done by Owen's brother Harold to paint his brother (as well as himself and the family name) in a better light. As curator of his brother's letters, Harold took great pains to destroy any references that could be suspicious, which must include references to Owen's sexual preferences. As seemingly complete as this biography is, Hibberd himself points out in his epilogue that there are facts about Owen's life that we may never know.

This book is an engaging read for any fan of World War I or any fan of poetry. The literary world is much indebted to Owen, whose poetry spoke the truth in a time or darkness, and whose innovations with style and technique were revered by the very poets he once emulated. If only the literary world was aware of this. Perhaps Dominic Hibberd's book will finally grant Owen his distinguished place and well-deserved fame in modern literature.

Following up on "beckahi" ... You may feel that Hibberd, in discussing Owen's sexuality, "seems a little over-insistent with too little to back it up," but this only reflects your unwillingness to admit the obvious. Owen's gayness is undisputed, except perhaps, as you say, by his brother Harold who was motivated by a misguided desire to "enshrine" Wilfrid's legend and effectively clean up the details he didn't like.

Owen's and Sassoon's romantic relationship has been well documented, but the proof is in the pudding! Owen *himself* writes about his feelings toward men, both in his private correspondence and, most significantly, in the poetry. Several poems (such as "Arms and the Boy" and "Sonnet To My Friend - With an Identity Disc") have heavy homoerotic content, and one ("To Eros") makes a crystal clear reference to the gender of his beloved. Credit should be given to Hibberd for discussing all this in the light of day.

As for the renewed interest Owen's poetry received in the 1960s, this is mostly due to it being masterfully set by Benjamin Britten in his 1962 "War Requiem". And let's just say that Britten's pacifism was not the only reason he felt a deep kinship toward Owen! ;-)

Dr. Hipp's tome wrestles with a great period of British Literature--World War I. The WWI literary field is as ripe as any, and Dr. Hipp takes on three of its giants. While Dr. Hipp is also known for his Nabokov scholarhip, he clearly is more than dabbling in this subject area. His book will soon be heavily referenced among students and scholars working in WWI literary history.

Anyone with a passing interest in writing or soldiery should read this book. Owen's passions, ambitions, times, the arc of his life, they're all here. Biographers analyze, novelists rearrange for dramatic impact, Owen wrote for no public audience and yet these letters beat them all. The equal of Keats' letters on poetry. Underappreciated and miraculous.

Anyone who loves Owen will want to read this biography; it's well-written and engaging and the section devoted to his wartime service is particularly strong. However...there is a refusal by Stallworthy to confront the reality of Owen's sexual nature -- possibly out of respect for Harold Owen, the poet's brother, who provided insights, anecdotes and documents of great value to Stallworthy. Unfortunately Stallworthy must tie himself in knots to avoid labeling Owen homosexual while at the same time citing lines in which Owen makes his physical and romantic desire for men, and the guilt this caused him, quite clear (and the reader is left with the strong impression that Stallworthy knows the score but doesn't feel he can present it honestly). A more recent biography of Owen, by Dominic Hibberd, deals frankly with this critical facet of the poet's nature (which had immense impact on his art and his life in the trenches), as well as being a very well-researched and well-written work all around. If an individual were to read only one biography of Wilfred Owen, I would therefore recommend that he or she choose Hibberd's version. But for anyone who truly loves and admires Owen, Stallworthy's study is highly recommended --Stallworthy provides a fascinating if incomplete picture of the poet; I would suggest reading this first and then moving on to Hibberd.

Anyone with an interest in the Great War and/or the poet Wilfred Owen will probably prosper from the reading of this book. Generally the book is an even and unbiased account of the social and poetic development of young Wilfred. Jon Stallworthy does an admirable job tracking Owen from a dreamy and slightly pompous school boy with an itch to be a famous poet into the man who is responsible for such works as: Anthem for Doomed Youth, Dulce Et Decorum Est, and Strange Meeting. The book also hosts a variety of photograghs featuring Owen, his friends, and family.

This is as complete a biography as there can be about a peculiar character. The author takes advantage of his friendship with Wilfred Owen's brother Harold, to get access to family documents and memories indispensable to get to know his subject better. The tone of the biography is balanced, objective and critical: it is not an elegy nor an attack.

Now, Wilfred Owen is one of the best poets of WWI, and his carrer is interesting and, above all, intriguing. Up until he's 20 or so, he's not a very likable character. His mother was a prudish Calvinist, tyranical and at times over-protecting, but she also supported Wilfred at every stage, especially in his early ambitions to be a great poet.

The interesting change is the one Wilfred experiences after he decides to volunteer for the Army. He changes, from being a pretentious, pompous and picky young man, to a courageous, strong, enduring leader. This change is best reflected in his attitude towards war itself: at first, he sees war as a glorious thing, a wonderful place to show grandiosity. Then, after bitter experiences, he realizes that war is not wonderful, but horrible, cruel, unjust. So the tone of his poetry changes from epic to lyrical. The interesting thing is that he is against war and its continuation, but in the meantime behaves bravely and disciplined in battle.

Another good thing about this book is its ability to capture the way of life, places, activities and feelings of that era.

This is, then, a book of interest for lovers of poetry and people who like to read about WWI.

I remember reading about Owen's poetry when looking up information on Siegfried Sasoon. While some of the poems in this collection will be too melancholic for some, there are some great poems in this volume that really make one think about passivity around issues of war and death. I especially liked "To Eros," "The Parable of the Old Man and the Young," and the few that are mentioned in Owen Knowles' excellent introduction. There are approxmately 70 pages of really good poetry here. While it really brings World War I to mind, it is very relevant to our current age's fascination with violence and war.

If you want a good introduction to Wilfred Owen's poems, get the Collected Works ISBN: 0811201325 instead.

Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, and
Isaac Rosenberg are four English poets who enlisted
in World War I, fought in the battles, wrote about
their experiences, and chronicled the truth of what
they saw of war and death in their poems. Of the four,
Owen, Brooke, and Rosenberg were killed in action,
while Sassoon survived until 1967, when he was 80.
Of these four poets of "the Great War," perhaps
Owen is the most lyrical, tragic, and filled with
pathos. In a letter to his mother, Owen wrote
after having seen a group of Scottish troops (who
would soon be dead) and the strange look on some
of their faces: "It was not despair, or terror,
it was more terrible than terror, for it was a
blindfold look, and without expression, like a
dead rabbit's. It will never be painted, and no
actor will ever seize it. And to describe it, I
think I must go back and be with them."
The editor of this volume, Douglas Kerr, says of
Owen: "This fatal vocation to witness -- for Owen
did return to the war, and was killed at the age
of twenty-five, a week before the fighting ended --
is the basis of his reputation as the best-known
of the poets of the Great War, and one of the
outstanding English writers of modern times. All of
Owen's important work in poetry was written in
just over a year, the last year of his life, and
almost all of it is about the war. 'My subject is
War, and the pity of War', he declared. 'The Poetry
is in the pity'. But it was not to be simply a
poetry of mourning, and still less of consolation.
'All a poet can do today is warn', he went on.
'That is why the true Poets must be truthful'."
Owen deals with the issues bravely and dead
on...no flinching or side-stepping. He grapples
with the issues of the War, his questioning of
his faith, and his affectionate awareness. As
Kerr also says, "And although Owen's declared
subject was 'War and the pity of War,' we can
find glimpses of his whole life here -- his
reading, his homosexuality, his friendships, his
love of music, his philosophical doubts, and his
physical enjoyments. These poems contain all
his personal history. *** Owen was not a pacifist,
but described himself as 'a conscientious objector
with a very seared conscience'. His disgust and
compassion, his anger and his courage, have done
as much as any other individual to shape the ways
we understand and feel about modern war."
Here is the beginning of one of Owen's poems
of affection titled "Storm":
His face was charged with beauty as a cloud
With glimmering lightning. When it shadowed me
I shook, and was uneasy as a tree
That draws the brilliant danger, tremulous, bowed.
-------------------------

The books in this trilogy get better as you go. Eye in the Door certainly explores the dissolving bonds of society in war time but Ghost Road seems to move the theme even further into the primitive societal meaning of war.

In Regeneration, Siefried Sassoon must find personal meaning in this horroble meaningless mess called World War I. In Eye in the Door we seen how sexual bonds are losened while society seeks to blame negative events in wartime on homosexuals. Finally in Ghost Road we see war as the sacrifice of the young male to the gods. The upperclass elderly males who direct wars sacrifice the young sons of the working class on an altar of horror. Dr. Rivers makes this connect as he treats the young Billy Pryor for shell shock while remembering the ritual sacrifice of the Melanesian head hunters.

The trilogy is absolutely great and should be read in order to follow the character developement as well as the exploration of war that Barker develops differently with each book.

THE GHOST ROAD is the final volume of Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy, and the winner of the 1995 Booker Prize. Throughout the trilogy Barker performs a phenomenal job of detailing the psychological consequences of trench warfare during the Great War. Set in London and France, THE GHOST ROAD focuses on the principle characters of Billy Prior and the renowned Dr. Rivers and their personal relationships with each other and the First World War. The reader is provided a glimpse into the terrible conditions of trench fighting, and how the medical establishment viewed shell-shock as a medical diagnosis and how it was treated. Through the poetry of Owen, Sassoon, etc, the world can begin to understand the personal horrors they have witnessed of a war that many did not understand. Based loosely on historical events and characters, Barker has created a perspective of modern warfare that does not contain the quintessential happy ending.

I believe each volume of the Regeneration Trilogy should be read in chronological order (REGENERATION, THE EYE IN THE DOOR, AND THE GHOST ROAD) to fully appreciate the merits of each volume. Although the plot is re-summarized at the beginning of each book, the main characters are continually being developed throughout. I just finished reading GHOST ROAD, and I have to admit that it's not my favorite of the three. I don't understand how this volume was awarded the Booker Prize when I believe REGENERATION is the strongest of the bunch. I also enjoyed THE EYE IN THE DOOR because of the exploration of societal issues during The First War, especially scape-goating of homosexuals and pacifists.

Overall, this trilogy is a wonderful glimpse into the atmosphere of Britain during the First World War.

Everyone living in the 21st century who cares about the future of humanity -- not to mention fine literature -- should read this extremely skillfully written, emotionally powerful novel of The Great War. Pat Barker has perfect control over her material, and manages to write with power but never goes over the top or gets melodramatic -- a tough thing to do when you're writing about any war. Starting gently, subtly, even humorously, the book builds quietly until it reaches its final, wrenching chapters. It's a touching, compelling, beautifully told tale that deserves a worldwide audience. I can't wait to read more by Pat Barker!

Not your ordinary war read. I love authors that take a topic of huge proportions, say World War I, and write a book that actually stands taller in the imagination of the reader as great a couple weeks later.

I reviewed REGENERATION, the first volume in Pat Barker's WW1 trilogy, when I first read it and liked it. I did not submit a review of the second volume, THE EYE IN THE DOOR, because it did not seem to sustain the promise (or answer the questions) of the first, and I felt it necessary to see how this third volume would pull the threads together. My verdict: while THE GHOST ROAD is certainly a more focused book than its predecessor, it still does not quite sew the trilogy into a coherent whole.

Barker's method is to take a huge subject that has been much written about, the first World War, and to examine it from unusual angles. Almost all the first two books and the first two-thirds of this one take place in Britain rather than in France. They do not show the war itself, but its effects on the damaged minds of soldiers who return from it, and on social attitudes at home. The brilliance of the first volume was to take two real people -- the poet Siegfried Sassoon and the pioneering psychiatrist William Rivers -- and trace their interaction at Craiglockhart mental hospital, where Sassoon has been sent after publishing a denunciaton of the war. I doubt that Barker had a trilogy in mind when she wrote the first book, and it might have been difficult to have extended it further in the same vein. THE EYE IN THE DOOR suffers from having too many characters; there is a bit of Sassoon, a bit of Rivers, and a bewildering array of new people, but the main character is a relatively minor figure from the first book, Billy Prior. The main subject of the story is the strongly prejudiced reactionism in wartime Britain, taking as its targets pacifists, socialists, and homosexuals. It is a hard book to follow, and it rather loses its way.

THE GHOST ROAD more or less gets back on track, by giving more of the book to Rivers, by building Prior into a richer and more sympathetic character, and finally moving the action into the trenches for the last chapters. But the focus on war poets which gave such character to the first book has all but vanished in this one. Sassoon barely appears. Wilfred Owen, who figured as a secondary character in the first book, returns here and dies (as he did) in the last days of the way, but he is treated so peripherally that it is hard to see why the author cites no less than six books on him in her concluding bibliography.

This change of direction is a pity, because Barker is much more successful finding the humanity in her real characters than she is inventing others out of whole cloth. She seems to want to use Billy Prior, for example, in protean fashion, to represent whatever she needs at any given moment: a homosexual and yet a lover of women; an officer and gentleman who nonetheless comes from a working-class background; a soldier turned civil servant turned solider again. The lack of focus in Prior's own life risks the narrative focus of the last two books; his decision to return to France comes as a relief, because it simplifies everything.

The psychiartist Rivers has always been an attractive and complex character, I think because his complexity is real and not made up. In this volume, Barker fills him out by delving into his past: his relationship with Lewis Carrol as a child, and his anthropological work in the South Seas at the start of the century. Both are interesting, but their relationship to the overall direction of the trilogy is less clear. Others have commented on the parallels between the Melanesian culture and the situation in the trenches, but I do not find it especially cogent. However, it certainly makes an unusual angle on the war, and the ability to find unusual angles has been Pat Barker's greatest success from beginning to end.

Owen gives a sense of sadness of the war through the eye of a little child.

That's an interesting combination of poets, considering how very different they were. Brooke was this handsome patriotic playboy and all his war-related poems are about the nobility of dying for your country, etc. He never actually fought. Owen was actually an officer in World War I and saw the worst of trench life, and many of his poems attempt (and succeed, in my opinion) in splashing mud all over Brooke's romanticized image of war and country. Brooke's poetry is very pretty, tidy, contained but Owen actually verges on being profound. Some of his work you just can't get out of your head. Anyway, get a book of Owen (The Poems of Wilfred Owen by Jon Stallworthy is the most complete compilation that I know of, but that basically means there's the bad stuff in there as well as the good ;) and skip Brooke.