I WOULD like to thank the poet’s brother, Harold Owen; his cousin, Leslie Gunston; Sir Osbert Sitwell; Siegfried Sassoon, and the British Museum authorities, for making available to me the drafts of the poems in their possession.

To Harold Owen I am deeply grateful also for allowing me to see the letters written by Wilfred to his family, for the many informative talks I have had with him about his brother, and for the encouragement and practical help he has given me.

I owe a special debt to Dr. D. S. R. Welland, who generously put at my disposal his unrivalled knowledge of the Owen texts: his suggestions, criticisms, and careful checking of my work have been invaluable.

In common with every other reader of Owen’s poetry, I am indebted to Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden, whose devoted editing of the poems, in their editions of 1920 and 1931, did so much for Owen’s fame and has so considerably lightened the task of the present editor. I am grateful to Edmund Blunden also for allowing me to reprint, with a few minor alterations, the Memoir he wrote for the 1931 edition.

C.D.I.

MAIN DATES OF WILFRED OWEN’S LIFE

March 18, 1893
Born, at Plas Wilmot, Oswestry, Shropshire, in the house of his maternal grandfather, Edward Shaw. The Owen family remained here till 1897.

1895
Birth of Mary Owen.

1897
Birth of Harold Owen. The family had moved to Shrewsbury in the spring of this year. After about a year, the Owens moved again-to Birkenhead.

1900
Birth of Colin Owen.

April 30, 1900
Wilfred Owen registered for entry into the Birkenhead Institute. He joined the school on June 11 of this year, and remained there until 1907, when the family returned to Shrewsbury.

1907
Owen began attending the Shrewsbury Technical School as a day boy.

September 1911
Matriculated at London University.

October 1911 to summer 1913
At Dunsden vicarage, Oxfordshire, as pupil and lay assistant to the Reverend Herbert Wigan.

c. August 1913Obtained post as tutor in English at the Berlitz School of Languages, Bordeaux. Took up the post in September.

c. July 1914
Left Berlitz School, became tutor to two boys in a Catholic family in Bordeaux.

c. September 1915
Returned to England.

October 22, 1915
Joined the Artists’ Rifles.

June 4, 1916
Commissioned in Manchester Regiment.

c. December 29, 1916
Sailed to France on active service, attached to Lancashire Fusiliers.

March 19, 1917
Sent to isth Casualty Clearing Station. Owen returned to his battalion early in April: on May 1 or 2 he was again sent to the 13th Casualty Clearing Station, and from there to the 41st Stationary Hospital. In June he went into No. 1 General Hospital, from which he was returned to England, arriving at the Welsh Hospital, Netley, about June 18.

June 26, 1917
Transferred to Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh.

November 1917
Discharged from Craiglockhart: posted to Northern Cavalry Barracks, Scarborough.

August 31 or September 1, 1918
Returned to France for active service.

October 1, 1918
Awarded Military Cross.

November 4, 1918
Killed in action, trying to get his men across the Sambre Canal.

INTRODUCTION

WILFRED Owen must remain, in one respect at least, an enigma. His war poems, a body of work composed between January 1917, when he was first sent to the Western Front, and November 1918, when he was killed, seem to me certainly the finest written by any English poet of the First War and probably the greatest poems about war in our literature. His fame was posthumous—he had only four poems published in his lifetime. The bulk of his best work was written or finished during a period of intense creative activity, from August 1917 (in one week of October he wrote six poems) to September 1918—a period comparable with the annus mirabilis of his admired Keats. The originality and force of their language, the passionate nature of the indignation and pity they express, their blending of harsh realism with a sensuousness unatrophied by the horrors from which they flowered, all these make me feel that Owen’s war poems are mature poetry, and that in the best of them—as in a few which he wrote on other subjects—he showed himself a major poet.

The enigma lies in this maturity. Reading through what survives of the unpublished poetry Owen wrote before 1917, I found myself more and more amazed at the suddenness of his development from a very minor poet to something altogether larger. It was as if, during the weeks of his first tour of duty in the trenches, he came of age emotionally and spiritually. His earlier work, though an occasional line or phrase gives us a pre-echo of the run of words or tone of thought in his mature poetry, is for the most part no more promising than any other aspiring adolescent’s of that period would have been. It is vague, vaporous, subjective, highly ‘poetic’ in a pseudo—Keatsian way, with Tennysonian and Ninety—ish echoes here and there: the verse of a youth in love with the idea of poetry—and in love with Love.

And then, under conditions so hideous that they might have been expected to maim a poet rather than make him, Owen came into his own. No gradual development brought his work to maturity. It was a forced growth, a revolution in his mind which, blasting its way through all the poetic bric-à-brac, enabled him to see his subject clear—‘War, and the pity of War’. The subject made the poet: the poet made poems which radically changed our attitude towards war. The front-line poets who were Owen’s contemporaries—Sassoon, Rosenberg, Graves, Blunden, Osbert Sitwell—played a most honourable part, too, in showing us what modern war was really like ; but it is Owen, I believe, whose poetry came home deepest to my own generation, so that we could never again think of war as anything but a vile, if necessary, evil.

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was bom at Oswestry on March 18th, 1893, of middle-class stock.

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MY ACCOUNT

The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen Read Online

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

MAIN DATES OF WILFRED OWEN’S LIFE

INTRODUCTION

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