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.

As a 13 year old boy I do not consider myself an expert on World War I poetry. Yet still I can tell that the poems of Wilfred Owen are a world apart from the likes of Rupert Brooke and other such optimists. For sure his portrayal of the war in such poems as 'Dulce et Decorum est' is more realistic than that of 'The Soldier' which talks of how as a soldier dies, he thinks of how glad he is glad that he has helped England, and how his heart is at peace under an English heaven. It seems to me that his superiors might have encouraged him to right pleasant poetry to please those back at the 'Home Front'. Yet Wilfred Owen's poetry also reflects his high level of education. Combining the skill and beauty of Brooke, with the harsh reality of such poems as 'The General' and 'To the Warmongers' to create a unique mastery of portraying the life of a first world war soldier.

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.

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...

If only one worthwile thing came from the forst world war (1914-1918) it may have been some of the finest poetry in the english language. Several poets represented here (Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen and others) lost their lives while ironicaly producing their finest works. This fine collection, splendidly arranged and read, gave me in turn feelings of hope, outrage, regret, humor, and resignation. The final work, Laurence Binyon's "For The Fallen" eulogizes the dead and their memory. Although written for the English dead, it serves well as a memorial for all war dead. Set against Elgar's "Nimrod" music, it is moving and emotional.

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.

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.
-------------------------

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.

Recalling the books of Lost Generation enriched with psychoanalytic experience and author's brilliant style, Ms Pat Barker's sad story takes all your attention from the first pages. Two main lines of the novel's plot tell us about Lt Billy Prior, who returns to the Field Forces in France in the last months of the WWI, and Dr William Rivers, whose memory revives the days of his life amidst the head-hunters of Melanesia. So we have two different rungs of the social ladder of human civilization - Europe as the upper edge and Melanesia as the bottom one. Former head-hunters, whose cruel practice was strictly proscribed by 'civilized white men', can restrain their passions (though coveting for past bloody raids) and even have reverent attitide towards human death and complicated rituals of interment. Intertwining episodes of both main lines Ms Barker delineates a hideous picture of insensate and endless ('Nobody's in control. Nobody knows how to stop.') human abattoir of the last battles of the war in Europe where 'civilized white men' destroy themselves in madness unknown for the Melanesian barbarians. Yet the heroes of the novel do not know that this war is only the World War I: the Ghost Road of human civilization...

Although "Regeneration" is my favorite of Pat Barker's World War I trilogy, I thought "The Ghost Road" was a brilliant and tragic ending. The novel takes us to the final days of World War I, where we witness the tragic fate of Billy Prior, the working-class anti-hero of the trilogy. Interspersed with his experiences in France we also join the psychiatrist, Dr. Rivers. Rivers deals with his unpleasant duty of preparing men to return to battle as he remembers his anthropological work in the Melanesian islands, amongst the members of a culture that was slowly dying out.

Barker's restrained style is extremely moving -- far more so than the florid prose of Sebastian Faulks' World War I novel "Birdsong." Every time I've read this novel, I've been moved to tears.

P.S. The reader from South Africa who was so incensed at Ms. Barker's "factual inaccuracies" might want to check again: There were indeed air raids over England in World War I -- they were carried out by the infamous Zeppelins! Also, Dr. Rivers was living amongst the head-hunters of Melanesia in the Pacific (probably Borneo or thereabouts) NOT Africa.

Pat Barker's trilogy, "Regeneration, "The Eye in the Door," and "The Ghost Road," was like reading a gathering storm. The first two novels essentially set the stage for me for her Booker Prize-winning "The Ghost Road." There the two most powerful characters in the trilogy, Dr. William Rivers, and Lt. Billy Prior, seized me by the brain and would not let go until the final page of the novel, a profound and powerful elegy to the senselessness of war, and to World War I in particular. All three novels, spare and trenchant, make a nifty read on the bus--which is where I enjoyed them going back and forth to work.

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.