Dulce et Decorum Est

By Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
 Anthem for Doomed Youth
By Wilfred Owen
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
      — Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
      Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells; 
      Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
      And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?

      Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
      The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
 The Send-Off
By Wilfred Owen
Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their way
To the siding-shed,
And lined the train with faces grimly gay.
 
Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray
As men's are, dead.
 
Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp
Stood staring hard,
Sorry to miss them from the upland camp.
Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp
Winked to the guard.
 
So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.
They were not ours:
We never heard to which front these were sent.
 
Nor there if they yet mock what women meant
Who gave them flowers.
 
Shall they return to beatings of great bells
In wild trainloads?
A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,
May creep back, silent, to still village wells
Up half-known roads.
 Strange Meeting
By Wilfred Owen
It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,

Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,— 
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.

With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained;

Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
“Strange friend,” I said, “here is no cause to mourn.” 
“None,” said that other, “save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something had been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled.
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress. 
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
Courage was mine, and I had mystery;
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery: 
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels, 
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.

“I am the enemy you killed, my friend.

I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now. . . .”
 Futility
By Wilfred Owen
Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields half-sown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds—

Woke once the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?
 Disabled
By Wilfred Owen
He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark,
And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey,
Legless, sewn short at elbow. Through the park
Voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn,
Voices of play and pleasure after day,
Till gathering sleep had mothered them from him.

                            *        *        *        *        *

About this time Town used to swing so gay

When glow-lamps budded in the light-blue trees, 
And girls glanced lovelier as the air grew dim,—
In the old times, before he threw away his knees.
Now he will never feel again how slim
Girls' waists are, or how warm their subtle hands,
All of them touch him like some queer disease.

                            *        *        *        *        *

There was an artist silly for his face,

For it was younger than his youth, last year.
Now, he is old; his back will never brace;
He's lost his colour very far from here,
Poured it down shell-holes till the veins ran dry,
And half his lifetime lapsed in the hot race 
And leap of purple spurted from his thigh.

                            *        *        *        *        *

One time he liked a blood-smear down his leg,

After the matches carried shoulder-high.
It was after football, when he'd drunk a peg,
He thought he'd better join. He wonders why.
Someone had said he'd look a god in kilts.
That's why; and maybe, too, to please his Meg,
Aye, that was it, to please the giddy jilts,
He asked to join. He didn't have to beg;
Smiling they wrote his lie: aged nineteen years.
Germans he scarcely thought of, all their guilt,
And Austria's, did not move him. And no fears
Of Fear came yet. He thought of jewelled hilts
For daggers in plaid socks; of smart salutes;
And care of arms; and leave; and pay arrears;
Esprit de corps; and hints for young recruits.
And soon, he was drafted out with drums and cheers.

                            *        *        *        *        *

Some cheered him home, but not as crowds cheer Goal.

Only a solemn man who brought him fruits
Thanked him; and then inquired about his soul.

                            *        *        *        *        *

Now, he will spend a few sick years in institutes,

And do what things the rules consider wise,
And take whatever pity they may dole.
Tonight he noticed how the women's eyes
Passed from him to the strong men that were whole.
How cold and late it is! Why don't they come
And put him into bed? Why don't they come?
 Exposure
By Wilfred Owen
Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us . . . 
Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent . . .
Low drooping flares confuse our memory of the salient . . .
Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous,
       But nothing happens. 

Watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire,

Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles.
Northward, incessantly, the flickering gunnery rumbles,
Far off, like a dull rumour of some other war.
       What are we doing here?

The poignant misery of dawn begins to grow . . .

We only know war lasts, rain soaks, and clouds sag stormy.
Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army
Attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of grey,
       But nothing happens.

Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence.

Less deadly than the air that shudders black with snow,
With sidelong flowing flakes that flock, pause, and renew,
We watch them wandering up and down the wind's nonchalance,
       But nothing happens.

Pale flakes with fingering stealth come feeling for our faces—
We cringe in holes, back on forgotten dreams, and stare, snow-dazed,
Deep into grassier ditches. So we drowse, sun-dozed,
Littered with blossoms trickling where the blackbird fusses.
       —Is it that we are dying?

Slowly our ghosts drag home: glimpsing the sunk fires, glozed
With crusted dark-red jewels; crickets jingle there;
For hours the innocent mice rejoice: the house is theirs;
Shutters and doors, all closed: on us the doors are closed,—
       We turn back to our dying.

Since we believe not otherwise can kind fires burn;

Now ever suns smile true on child, or field, or fruit.
For God's invincible spring our love is made afraid;
Therefore, not loath, we lie out here; therefore were born,
       For love of God seems dying.

Tonight, this frost will fasten on this mud and us,

Shrivelling many hands, and puckering foreheads crisp.
The burying-party, picks and shovels in shaking grasp,
Pause over half-known faces. All their eyes are ice,
       But nothing happens.

Spring Offensive
By Wilfred Owen
Halted against the shade of a last hill,
They fed, and, lying easy, were at ease
And, finding comfortable chests and knees
Carelessly slept.
                               But many there stood still
To face the stark, blank sky beyond the ridge,
Knowing their feet had come to the end of the world.
Marvelling they stood, and watched the long grass swirled
By the May breeze, murmurous with wasp and midge,
For though the summer oozed into their veins
Like the injected drug for their bones’ pains,
Sharp on their souls hung the imminent line of grass,
Fearfully flashed the sky’s mysterious glass.
 
Hour after hour they ponder the warm field—
And the far valley behind, where the buttercups
Had blessed with gold their slow boots coming up,
Where even the little brambles would not yield,
But clutched and clung to them like sorrowing hands;
They breathe like trees unstirred.
Till like a cold gust thrilled the little word
At which each body and its soul begird
And tighten them for battle. No alarms
Of bugles, no high flags, no clamorous haste—
Only a lift and flare of eyes that faced
The sun, like a friend with whom their love is done.
O larger shone that smile against the sun,—
Mightier than his whose bounty these have spurned.
 
So, soon they topped the hill, and raced together
Over an open stretch of herb and heather
Exposed. And instantly the whole sky burned
With fury against them; and soft sudden cups
Opened in thousands for their blood; and the green slopes
Chasmed and steepened sheer to infinite space.
 
Of them who running on that last high place
Leapt to swift unseen bullets, or went up
On the hot blast and fury of hell’s upsurge,
Or plunged and fell away past this world’s verge,
Some say God caught them even before they fell.
But what say such as from existence’ brink
Ventured but drave too swift to sink.
The few who rushed in the body to enter hell,
And there out-fiending all its fiends and flames
With superhuman inhumanities,
Long-famous glories, immemorial shames—
And crawling slowly back, have by degrees
Regained cool peaceful air in wonder—
Why speak they not of comrades that went under?

Wilfred Owen

Mental Cases

Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?

Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,
Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish,
Baring teeth that leer like skulls' tongues wicked?
Stroke on stroke of pain, — but what slow panic,
Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets?
Ever from their hair and through their hand palms
Misery swelters. Surely we have perished
Sleeping, and walk hell; but who these hellish?

— These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.

Memory fingers in their hair of murders,
Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.
Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander,
Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.
Always they must see these things and hear them,
Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles,
Carnage incomparable and human squander
Rucked too thick for these men's extrication.

Therefore still their eyeballs shrink tormented

Back into their brains, because on their sense
Sunlight seems a bloodsmear; night comes blood-black;
Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh
— Thus their heads wear this hilarious, hideous,
Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses.
— Thus their hands are plucking at each other;
Picking at the rope-knouts of their scourging;
Snatching after us who smote them, brother,
Pawing us who dealt them war and madness.

Inspection - Poem by Wilfred Owen

'You! What d'you mean by this?' I rapped.

'You dare come on parade like this?'
'Please, sir, it's-' ''Old yer mouth,' the sergeant snapped.
'I takes 'is name, sir?'-'Please, and then dismiss.'

Some days 'confined to camp' he got,

For being 'dirty on parade'.
He told me, afterwards, the damnèd spot
Was blood, his own. 'Well, blood is dirt,' I said.

'Blood's dirt,' he laughed, looking away,

Far off to where his wound had bled
And almost merged for ever into clay.
'The world is washing out its stains,' he said.
'It doesn't like our cheeks so red:
Young blood's its great objection.
But when we're duly white-washed, being dead,
The race will bear Field-Marshal God's inspection.'

The Dead-Beat - Poem by Wilfred Owen

He dropped, - more sullenly than wearily,

Lay stupid like a cod, heavy like meat,
And none of us could kick him to his feet;
-just blinked at my revolver, blearily;
- Didn't appear to know a war was on,
Or see the blasted trench at which he stared.
'I'll do 'em in,' he whined. 'If this hand's spared,
I'll murder them, I will.'

A low voice said,

'It's Blighty, p'raps, he sees; his pluck's all gone,
Dreaming of all the valiant, that aren't dead:
Bold uncles, smiling ministerially;
Maybe his brave young wife, getting her fun
In some new home, improved materially.
It's not these stiffs have crazed him; nor the Hun.'

We sent him down at last, out of the way.

Unwounded; - stout lad, too, before that strafe.
Malingering? Stretcher-bearers winked, 'Not half!'

Next day I heard the Doc's well-whiskied laugh:

'That scum you sent last night soon died. Hooray!'

The Parable Of The Old Man And The Young - Poem by Wilfred Owen

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,

And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and strops,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

S.I.W. - Poem by Wilfred Owen

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"I will to the King,
And offer him consolation in his trouble,
For that man there has set his teeth to die,
And being one that hates obedience,
Discipline, and orderliness of life,
I cannot mourn him."
-- W. B. Yeats.

Patting goodbye, doubtless they told the lad

He'd always show the Hun a brave man's face;
Father would sooner him dead than in disgrace, --
Was proud to see him going, aye, and glad.
Perhaps his Mother whimpered how she'd fret
Until he got a nice, safe wound to nurse.
Sisters would wish girls too could shoot, charge, curse, . . .
Brothers -- would send his favourite cigarette,
Each week, month after month, they wrote the same,
Thinking him sheltered in some Y.M. Hut,
Where once an hour a bullet missed its aim
And misses teased the hunger of his brain.
His eyes grew old with wincing, and his hand
Reckless with ague. Courage leaked, as sand
From the best sandbags after years of rain.
But never leave, wound, fever, trench-foot, shock,
Untrapped the wretch. And death seemed still withheld
For torture of lying machinally shelled,
At the pleasure of this world's Powers who'd run amok.

He'd seen men shoot their hands, on night patrol,

Their people never knew. Yet they were vile.
"Death sooner than dishonour, that's the style!"
So Father said.

One dawn, our wire patrol

Carried him. This time, Death had not missed.
We could do nothing, but wipe his bleeding cough.
Could it be accident? -- Rifles go off . . .
Not sniped? No. (Later they found the English ball.)

It was the reasoned crisis of his soul.

Against the fires that would not burn him whole
But kept him for death's perjury and scoff
And life's half-promising, and both their riling.

With him they buried the muzzle his teeth had kissed,
And truthfully wrote the Mother "Tim died smiling."

Apologia Pro Poemate Meo - Poem by Wilfred Owen

I, too, saw God through mud--

The mud that cracked on cheeks when wretches smiled.
War brought more glory to their eyes than blood,
And gave their laughs more glee than shakes a child.

Merry it was to laugh there--

Where death becomes absurd and life absurder.
For power was on us as we slashed bones bare
Not to feel sickness or remorse of murder.

I, too, have dropped off fear--

Behind the barrage, dead as my platoon,
And sailed my spirit surging, light and clear,
Past the entanglement where hopes lie strewn;

And witnessed exhultation--

Faces that used to curse me, scowl for scowl,
Shine and lift up with passion of oblation,
Seraphic for an hour, though they were foul.

I have made fellowships--

Untold of happy lovers in old song.
For love is not the binding of fair lips
With the soft silk of eyes that look and long.
By joy, whose ribbon slips,--
But wound with war's hard wire whose stakes are strong;
Bound with the bandage of the arm that drips;
Knit in the welding of the rifle-thong.

I have perceived much beauty

In the hoarse oaths that kept our courage straight;
Heard music in the silentness of duty;
Found peace where shell-storms spouted reddest spate.

Nevertheless, except you share

With them in hell the sorrowful dark of hell,
Whose world is but a trembling of a flare
And heaven but a highway for a shell,

You shall not hear their mirth:

You shall not come to think them well content
By any jest of mine. These men are worth
Your tears: You are not worth their merriment.

1914 - Poem by Wilfred Owen

War broke: and now the Winter of the world

With perishing great darkness closes in.
The foul tornado, centred at Berlin,
Is over all the width of Europe whirled,
Rending the sails of progress. Rent or furled
Are all Art's ensigns. Verse wails. Now begin
Famines of thought and feeling. Love's wine's thin.
The grain of human Autumn rots, down-hurled.

For after Spring had bloomed in early Greece,

And Summer blazed her glory out with Rome,
An Autumn softly fell, a harvest home,
A slow grand age, and rich with all increase.
But now, for us, wild Winter, and the need
Of sowings for new Spring, and blood for seed.
Wilfred Owen

Poet Details

1893–1918

Wilfred Owen, who wrote some of the best British poetry on World War I, composed nearly all
of his poems in slightly over a year, from August 1917 to September 1918. In November 1918 he
was killed in action at the age of twenty-five, one week before the Armistice. Only five poems
were published in his lifetime—three in the Nation and two that appeared anonymously in the
Hydra, a journal he edited in 1917 when he was a patient at Craiglockhart War Hospital in
Edinburgh. Shortly after his death, seven more of his poems appeared in the 1919 volume of
Edith Sitwell's annual anthology, Wheels, a volume dedicated to his memory, and in 1919 and
1920 seven other poems appeared in periodicals. Almost all of Owen’s poems, therefore,
appeared posthumously: Poems (1920), edited by Siegfried Sassoon with the assistance of Edith
Sitwell, contains twenty-three poems; The Poems of Wilfred Owen (1931), edited by Edmund
Blunden, adds nineteen poems to this number; and The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen (1963),
edited by C. Day Lewis, contains eighty poems, adding some juvenilia, minor poems, and
fragments but omitting a few of the poems from Blunden’s edition.

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born on 18 March 1893, in Oswestry, on the Welsh border of
Shropshire, in the beautiful and spacious home of his maternal grandfather. Wilfred’s father,
Thomas, a former seaman, had returned from India to marry Susan Shaw; throughout the rest of
his life Thomas felt constrained by his somewhat dull and low-paid position as a railway station
master. Owen’s mother felt that her marriage limited her intellectual, musical, and economic
ambitions. Both parents seem to have been of Welsh descent, and Susan’s family had been
relatively affluent during her childhood but had lost ground economically. As the oldest of four
children born in rapid succession, Wilfred developed a protective attitude toward the others and
an especially close relationship with his mother. After he turned four, the family moved from the
grandfather’s home to a modest house in Birkenhead, where Owen attended Birkenhead Institute
from 1900 to 1907. The family then moved to another modest house, in Shrewsbury, where
Owen attended Shrewsbury Technical School and graduated in 1911 at the age of 18. Having
attempted unsuccessfully to win a scholarship to attend London University, he tried to measure
his aptitude for a religious vocation by becoming an unpaid lay assistant to the Reverend Herbert
Wigan, a vicar of evangelical inclinations in the Church of England, at Dunsden, Oxfordshire. In
return for the tutorial instruction he was to receive, but which did not significantly materialize,
Owen agreed to assist with the care of the poor and sick in the parish and to decide within two
years whether he should commit himself to further training as a clergyman. At Dunsden he
achieved a fuller understanding of social and economic issues and developed his humanitarian
propensities, but as a consequence of this heightened sensitivity, he became disillusioned with
the inadequate response of the Church of England to the sufferings of the underprivileged and
the dispossessed. In his spare time, he read widely and began to write poetry. In his initial verses
he wrote on the conventional subjects of the time, but his work also manifested some stylistic
qualities that even then tended to set him apart, especially his keen ear for sound and his instinct
for the modulating of rhythm, talents related perhaps to the musical ability that he shared with
both of his parents.

In 1913 he returned home, seriously ill with a respiratory infection that his living in a damp,
unheated room at the vicarage had exacerbated. He talked of poetry, music, or graphic art as
possible vocational choices, but his father urged him to seek employment that would result in a
steady income. After eight months of convalescence at home, Owen taught for one year in
Bordeaux at the Berlitz School of Languages, and he spent a second year in France with a
Catholic family, tutoring their two boys. As a result of these experiences, he became a
Francophile. Later these years undoubtedly heightened his sense of the degree to which the war
disrupted the life of the French populace and caused widespread suffering among civilians as the
Allies pursued the retreating Germans through French villages in the summer and fall of 1918.

In September 1915, nearly a year after the United Kingdom and Germany had gone to war,
Owen returned to England, uncertain as to whether he should enlist. By October he had enlisted
and was at first in the Artists’ Rifles. In June 1916 he received a commission as lieutenant in the
Manchester Regiment, and on 29 December 1916 he left for France with the Lancashire
Fusiliers.

Judging by his first letters to his mother from France, one might have anticipated that Owen
would write poetry in the idealistic vein of Rupert Brooke: “There is a fine heroic feeling about
being in France....” But by 6 January 1917 he wrote of the marching, “The awful state of the
roads, and the enormous weight carried was too much for scores of men.” Outfitted in hip-length
rubber waders, on 8 January he had waded through two and a half miles of trenches with “a
mean depth of two feet of water.” By 9 January he was housed in a hut where only seventy yards
away a howitzer fired every minute day and night. On 12 January occurred the march and attack
of poison gas he later reported in “Dulce et Decorum Est.” They marched three miles over a
shelled road and three more along a flooded trench, where those who got stuck in the heavy mud
had to leave their waders, as well as some clothing and equipment, and move ahead on bleeding
and freezing feet. They were under machine-gun fire, shelled by heavy explosives throughout the
cold march, and were almost unconscious from fatigue when the poison-gas attack occurred.
Another incident that month, in which one of Owen’s men was blown from a ladder in their
trench and blinded, forms the basis of “The Sentry.” In February Owen attended an infantry
school at Amiens. On 19 March he was hospitalized for a brain concussion suffered six nights
earlier, when he fell into a fifteen-foot-deep shell hole while searching in the dark for a soldier
overcome by fatigue. Blunden dates the writing of Owen’s sonnet “To A Friend (With an
Identity Disc)” to these few days in the hospital. Throughout April the battalion suffered
incredible physical privations caused by the record-breaking cold and snow and by the heavy
shelling. For four days and nights Owen and his men remained in an open field in the snow, with
no support forces arriving to relieve them and with no chance to change wet, frozen clothes or to
sleep: “I kept alive on brandy, the fear of death, and the glorious prospect of the cathedral town
just below us, glittering with the morning.” Three weeks later on 25 April he continued to write
his mother of the intense shelling: “For twelve days I did not wash my face, nor take off my
boots, nor sleep a deep sleep. For twelve days we lay in holes where at any moment a shell might
put us out.” One wet night during this time he was blown into the air while he slept. For the next
several days he hid in a hole too small for his body, with the body of a friend, now dead, huddled
in a similar hole opposite him, and less than six feet away. In these letters to his mother he
directed his bitterness not at the enemy but at the people back in England “who might relieve us
and will not.”

Having endured such experiences in January, March, and April, Owen was sent to a series of
hospitals between 1 May and 26 June 1917 because of severe headaches. He thought them
related to his brain concussion, but they were eventually diagnosed as symptoms of shell shock,
and he was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh to become a patient of Dr. A.
Brock, the associate of Dr. W.H.R. Rivers, the noted neurologist and psychologist to whom
Siegfried Sassoon was assigned when he arrived six weeks later.

Owen’s annus mirabilis as a poet apparently began in the summer of 1917, but he had, in fact,
been preparing himself haphazardly but determinedly for a career as poet throughout the
preceding five or six years. He had worshipped Keats and later Shelley during adolescence;
during his two years at Dunsden he had read and written poetry in the isolated evenings at the
vicarage; in Bordeaux, the elderly symbolist poet and pacifist writer Laurent Tailhade had
encouraged him in his ambition to become a poet. Also in France in 1913 and 1914 he probably
read and studied the works of novelist and poet Jules Romains, who was experimenting with
pararhyme and assonance, although Romains’s treatise on half-rhyme or accords (Petit Traite de
Versification, written with G. Chenneviere) which describes several devices that Owen himself
used, was not published until after Owen’s death. While he was stationed in London in 1915 and
1916, he found stimulation in discussions with another older poet, Harold Monro, who ran the
Poetry Bookshop, a meeting place for poets; and in 1916, he read Rupert Brooke, William Butler
Yeats, and A.E. Housman. In the fall and winter of 1916, Owen, his cousin Leslie Gunston, and a
friend of Gunston’s engaged in an extended literary game in which the three decided upon a
topic and then mailed to one another the verses they wrote on that topic. Owen was developing
his skill in versification, his technique as a poet, and his appreciation for the poetry of others,
especially that of his more important contemporaries, but until 1917 he was not expressing his
own significant experiences and convictions except in letters to his mother and brother. This
preparation, the three bitter months of suffering, the warmth of the people of Edinburgh who
“adopted” the patients, the insight of Dr. Brock, and the coincidental arrival of Siegfried Sassoon
brought forth the poet and the creative outpouring of his single year of maturity.

Before Sassoon arrived at Craiglockhart in mid-August, Dr. Brock encouraged Owen to edit the
hospital journal, the Hydra, which went through twelve issues before Owen left. Later in Owen’s
stay Brock also arranged for him to play in a community orchestra, to renew his interests in
biology and archaeology, to participate in a debating society, to give lectures at Tynecastle
School, and to do historical research at the Edinburgh Advocates Library.

It seems likely that this sensitive psychologist and enthusiastic friend assisted Owen in
confronting the furthermost ramifications of his violent experiences in France so that he could
write of the terrifying experiences in poems such as “Dulce et Decorum Est,” “The Sentry,” and
“The Show.” He may also have helped him confront his shyness; his apparently excessive
involvement with his mother and his attempt, at the same time, to become more independent; his
resentment of his father’s disapproval of his ambition for a career as a poet; his ambivalence
about Christianity and his disillusionment with Christian religion in the practices of the
contemporary church; his expressed annoyance with all women except his mother and his
attraction to other men; and his decision to return to his comrades in the trenches rather than to
stay in England to protest the continuation of the war.

When Sassoon arrived, it took Owen two weeks to get the courage to knock on his door and
identify himself as a poet. At that time Owen, like many others in the hospital, was speaking with
a stammer. By autumn he was not only articulate with his new friends and lecturing in the
community but was able to use his terrifying experiences in France, and his conflicts about
returning, as the subject of poems expressing his own deepest feelings. He experienced an
astonishing period of creative energy that lasted through several months, until he returned to
France and the heavy fighting in the fall of 1918.

By the time they met, Owen and Sassoon shared the conviction that the war ought to be ended,
since the total defeat of the Central Powers would entail additional destruction, casualties, and
suffering of staggering magnitude. In 1917 and 1918 both found their creative stimulus in a
compassionate identification with soldiers in combat and in the hospital. In spite of their strong
desire to remain in England to protest the continuation of the war, both finally returned to their
comrades in the trenches. Whatever the exact causes of Owen’s sudden emergence as “true poet”
in the summer of 1917, he himself thought that Sassoon had “fixed” him in place as poet. By the
time Sassoon arrived, his first volume of poetry, The Old Huntsman (1917), which includes some
war poems, had gained wide attention, and he was already preparing Counter-Attack (1918),
which was to have an even stronger impact on the English public. In the weeks immediately
before he was sent to Craiglockhart under military orders, Sassoon had been the center of public
attention for risking the possibility of court martial by mailing a formal protest against the war to
the War Department. Further publicity resulted when he dramatized his protest by throwing his
Military Cross into the River Mersey and when a member of the House of Commons read the
letter of protest before the hostile members of the House, an incident instigated by Bertrand
Russell in order to further the pacifist cause. Sassoon came from a wealthy and famous family.
He had been to Cambridge, he was seven years older than Owen, and he had many friends
among the London literati. Both pride and humility in having acquired Sassoon as friend
characterized Owen’s report to his mother of his visits to Sassoon’s room in September. He
remarked that he had not yet told his new friend “that I am not worthy to light his pipe. I simply
sit tight and tell him where I think he goes wrong.”

If their views on the war and their motivations in writing about it were similar, significant
differences appear when one compares their work. In the poems written after he went to France
in 1916 Sassoon consistently used a direct style with regular and exact rhyme, pronounced
rhythms, colloquial language, a strongly satiric mode; and he also tended to present men and
women in a stereotypical manner. After meeting Sassoon, Owen wrote several poems in
Sassoon’s drily satirical mode, but he soon rejected Sassoon’s terseness or epigrammatic
concision. Consequently, Owen created soldier figures who often express a fuller humanity and
emotional range than those in Sassoon’s more cryptic poems. In his war poems, whether
ideological, meditative, or lyrical, Owen achieved greater breadth than Sassoon did in his war
poetry. Even in some of the works that Owen wrote before he left Craiglockhart in the fall of
1917, he revealed a technical versatility and a mastery of sound through complex patterns of
assonance, alliteration, dissonance, consonance, and various other kinds of slant rhyme—an
experimental method of composition which went beyond any innovative versification that
Sassoon achieved during his long career.

While Owen wrote to Sassoon of his gratitude for his help in attaining a new birth as poet,
Sassoon did not believe he had influenced Owen as radically and as dramatically as Owen
maintained. Sassoon regarded his “touch of guidance” and his encouragement as fortunately
coming at the moment when Owen most needed them, and he later maintained in Siegfried’s
Journey, 1916-1920 that his “only claimable influence was that I stimulated him towards writing
with compassionate and challenging realism.... My encouragement was opportune, and can claim
to have given him a lively incentive during his rapid advance to self-revelation.” Sassoon also
saw what Owen may never have recognized—that Sassoon’s technique “was almost elementary
compared with his [Owen’s] innovating experiments.” Sassoon thought it important, however,
that he had given Owen a copy of Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu, from which he planned to quote in
his introduction to Counter-Attack, and he appreciated the benefits of their “eager discussion of
contemporary poets and the technical dodges which we were ourselves devising.” Perhaps
Sassoon’s statement in late 1945 summarizes best the reciprocal influence the two poets had
exerted upon one another: “imperceptible effects are obtained by people mingling their minds at
a favorable moment.”

Sassoon helped Owen by arranging for him, upon his discharge from the hospital, to meet Robert
Ross, a London editor who was Sassoon’s friend and the former publishing agent of Oscar
Wilde. Ross, in turn, introduced Owen—then and in May 1918—to other literary figures, such as
Robert Graves, Edith and Osbert Sitwell, Arnold Bennett, Thomas Hardy, and Captain Charles
Scott Moncrieff, who later translated Proust. Knowing these important writers made Owen feel
part of a community of literary people—one of the initiated. Accordingly, on New Year’s Eve
1917, Owen wrote exuberantly to his mother of his poetic ambitions: “I am started. The tugs
have left me. I feel the great swelling of the open sea taking my galleon.” At the same time,
association with other writers made him feel a sense of urgency—a sense that he must make up
for lost time in his development as a poet. In May 1918, on leave in London, he wrote his
mother: I am old already for a poet, and so little is yet achieved.” But he added with his wry
humor, “celebrity is the last infirmity I desire.”

By May 1918 Owen regarded his poems not only as individual expressions of intense experience
but also as part of a book that would give the reader a wide perspective on World War I. In
spring 1918 it appeared that William Heinemann (in spite of the paper shortage that his
publishing company faced) would assign Robert Ross to read Owen’s manuscript when he
submitted it to them. In a table of contents compiled before the end of July 1918 Owen followed
a loosely thematic arrangement. Next to each title he wrote a brief description of the poem, and
he also prepared in rough draft a brief, but eloquent, preface, in which he expresses his belief in
the cathartic function of poetry. For a man who had written sentimental or decorative verse
before his war poems of 1917 and 1918, Owen’s preface reveals an unexpected strength of
commitment and purpose as a writer, a commitment understandable enough in view of the
overwhelming effects of the war upon him. In this preface Owen said the poetry in his book
would express “the pity of War,” rather than the “glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or
power,” which war had acquired in the popular mind. He distinguished also between the pity he
sought to awaken by his poems (“The Poetry is in the Pity”) and that conventionally expressed
by writers who felt less intensely opposed to war by this time than he did. As they wrote their
historically oriented laments or elegies for those fallen in wars, they sought to comfort and
inspire readers by placing the deaths and war itself in the context of sacrifice for a significant
cause. But Owen’s message for his generation, he said, must be one of warning rather than of
consolation. In his last declaration he appears to have heeded Sassoon’s advice to him that he
begin to use an unmitigated realism in his description of events: “the true poet must be truthful.”

Owen’s identification of himself as a poet, affirmed by his new literary friends, must have been
especially important in the last few months of his life. Even the officer with whom he led the
remnant of the company to safety on a night in October 1918 and with whom he won the
Military Cross for his action later wrote to Blunden that neither he nor the rest of the men ever
dreamed that Owen wrote poems.

When Owen first returned to the battlefields of France on 1 September 1918, after several
months of limited service in England, he seemed confident about his decision: “I shall be better
able to cry my outcry, playing my part.” Once overseas, however, he wrote to Sassoon chiding
him for having urged him to return to France, for having alleged that further exposure to combat
would provide him with experience that he could transmute into poetry: “That is my consolation
for feeling a fool,” he wrote on 22 September 1918. He was bitterly angry at Clemenceau for
expecting the war to be continued and for disregarding casualties even among children in the
villages as the Allied troops pursued the German forces. He did not live long enough for this
indignation or the war experiences of September and October to become part of his poetry,
although both are vividly expressed in his letters.

In October Owen wrote of his satisfaction at being nominated for the Military Cross because
receiving the award would give him more credibility at home, especially in his efforts to bring
the war to an end. Lieutenant J. Foulkes, who shared command with him the night in October
1918 that all other officers were killed, described to Edmund Blunden the details of Owen’s acts
of “conspicuous gallantry.” His company had successfully attacked what was considered a
“second Hindenburg Line” in territory that was “well-wired.” Losses were so heavy that among
the commissioned officers only Foulkes and Owen survived. Owen took command and led the
men to a place where he held the line for several hours from a captured German pill box, the only
cover available. The pill box was, however, a potential death trap upon which the enemy
concentrated its fire. By morning the few who survived were at last relieved by the Lancashire
Fusiliers. Foulkes told Blunden, “This is where I admired his work—in leading his remnant, in
the middle of the night, back to safety.... I was content to follow him with the utmost
confidence.” Early in his army career Owen wrote to his brother Harold that he knew he could
not change his inward self in order to become a self-assured soldier, but that he might still be
able to change his appearance and behavior so that others would get the impression he was a
“good soldier.” Such determination and conscientiousness account for the trust in his leadership
that Foulkes expressed. (Harold Owen in his biography of his brother gives a more heroic
version of the acts of valor that night, but Foulkes’s emphasis on Owen’s efforts to get the
remaining troops back to safety seems in keeping with Owen’s own account and his attitude
toward the war and toward his men.) Owen was again moving among his men and offering
encouragement when he was killed the next month.

In the last weeks of his life Owen seems to have coped with the stress of the heavy casualties
among his battalion by “insensibility,” much like that of soldiers he forgives in his poem of the
same title, but condemns among civilians: “Happy are men who yet before they are killed / Can
let their veins run cold.” These men have walked “on the alleys cobbled with their brothers.”
“Alive, he is not vital overmuch; / Dying, not mortal overmuch.” Owen wrote to Sassoon, after
reading Counter-Attack , that Sassoon’s war poems frightened him more than the actual
experience of holding a soldier shot through the head and having the man’s blood soak hot
against his shoulder for a half hour. Two weeks before his death he wrote both to his mother and
to Sassoon that his nerves were “in perfect order.” But in the letter to Sassoon he explained, “I
cannot say I suffered anything, having let my brain grow dull.... I shall feel anger again as soon
as I dare, but now I must not. I don’t take the cigarette out of my mouth when I write Deceased
over their letters. But one day I will write Deceased over many books.”

After Wilfred Owen’s death his mother attempted to present him as a more pious figure than he
was. For his tombstone, she selected two lines from “The End”—”Shall life renew these bodies?
Of a truth / All death will he annul, all tears assuage?”—but omitted the question mark at the
close of the quotation. His grave thus memorializes a faith that he did not hold and ignores the
doubt he expressed. In 1931 Blunden wrote Sassoon, with irritation, because Susan Owen had
insisted that the collected edition of Owen’s poems celebrate her son as a majestic and tall heroic
figure: “Mrs. Owen has had her way, with a purple binding and a photograph Wh makes W look
like a 6 foot Major who had been in East Africa or so for several years.” (Owen was about a foot
shorter than Sassoon.)

If, in October 1918, Owen coped with his anguishing experiences by imitating his mother’s
refusal to see reality, the difference is notable. He clearly recognized that he was temporarily
refusing to grieve—an act of carefully practiced discipline—but that in a quieter time he would
recall those moments and create the “pity” in his poetry, as he had already done with the
experience of January 1917 in “The Sentry” and “Dulce et Decorum Est.” In “Insensibility” he
condemns those who, away from the field of battle, refuse to share “the eternal reciprocity of
tears.”

Harold Owen succeeded in removing a reference to his brother as “an idealistic homosexual”
from Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, and specifically addressed in volume three of his
biography the questions that had been raised about his brother’s disinterest in women. Harold
Owen insisted that his brother had been so dedicated to poetry that he had chosen, at least
temporarily, the life of a celibate. He also explains, what was undoubtedly true, that Owen
expressed himself impulsively and emotionally, that he was naive, and that he was given to hero
worship of other men.

Owen’s presentation of “boys” and “lads”—beautiful young men with golden hair, shining eyes,
strong brown hands, white teeth—has homoerotic elements. One must recognize, however, such
references had become stock literary devices in war poetry. The one poem which can clearly be
called a love poem, “To A Friend (With an Identity Disc),” carefully avoids the use of either
specifically masculine or feminine terms in addressing the friend. Eroticism in Owen’s poems
seems idealized, romantic, and platonic and is used frequently to contrast the ugly and horrible
aspects of warfare. Of more consequence in considering Owen’s sexual attitudes in relation to
his poetry is the harshness in reference to wives, mothers, or sweethearts of the wounded or
disabled soldiers. The fullness of his insight into “the pity of war” seems incomprehensibly
limited in the presentation of women in “The Dead-Beat,” “Disabled,” “The Send-Off,” and
“S.I.W.”

In several of his most effective war poems, Owen suggests that the experience of war for him
was surrealistic, as when the infantrymen dream, hallucinate, begin freezing to death, continue to
march after several nights without sleep, lose consciousness from loss of blood, or enter a
hypnotic state from fear or excessive guilt. The resulting disconnected sensory perceptions and
the speaker’s confusion about his identity suggest that not only the speaker, but the whole
humanity, has lost its moorings. The horror of war, then, becomes more universal, the tragedy
more overwhelming, and the pity evoked more profound, because there is no rational explanation
to account for the cataclysm.

In “Conscious” a wounded soldier, moving in and out of consciousness, cannot place in

perspective the yellow flowers beside his hospital bed, nor can he recall blue sky. The soldiers in
“Mental Cases” suffer hallucinations in which they observe everything through a haze of blood:
“Sunlight becomes a blood-smear; dawn comes blood-black.” In “Exposure,” which displays
Owen’s mastery of assonance and alliteration, soldiers in merciless wind and snow find
themselves overwhelmed by nature’s hostility and unpredictability. They even lose hope that
spring will arrive: “For God’s invincible spring our love is made afraid.” Anticipating the search
that night for the bodies of fallen soldiers in noman’s-land, the speaker predicts that soon all of
his comrades will be found as corpses with their eyes turned to ice. Ironically, as they begin
freezing to death, their pain becomes numbness and then pleasurable warmth. As the snow gently
fingers their cheeks, the freezing soldiers dream of summer: “so we drowse, sun-dozed / Littered
with blossoms trickling where the blackbird fusses.” Dreaming of warm hearths as “our ghosts
drag home,” they quietly “turn back to our dying.” The speaker in “Asleep” envies the comfort
of one who can sleep, even though the sleep is that of death: “He sleeps less tremulous, less
cold / Than we who must awake, and waking, say Alas!” All these “dream poems” suggest that
life is a nightmare in which the violence of war is an accepted norm. The cosmos seems either
cruelly indifferent or else malignant, certainly incapable of being explained in any rational
manner. A loving Christian God is nonexistent. The poem’s surface incoherence suggests the
utter irrationality of life. Even a retreat to the comfort of the unconscious state is vulnerable to
sudden invasion from the hell of waking life.

One of Owen’s most moving poems, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” which had its origins in Owen’s
experiences of January 1917, describes explicitly the horror of the gas attack and the death of a
wounded man who has been flung into a wagon. The horror intensifies, becoming a waking
nightmare experienced by the exhausted viewer, who stares hypnotically at his comrade in the
wagon ahead of him as he must continue to march.

The nightmare aspect reaches its apogee in “The Show.” As the speaker gazes upon a desolate,
war-ravaged landscape, it changes gradually to the magnified portion of a dead soldier’s face,
infested by thousands of caterpillars. The barbed wire of no-man’s-land becomes the scraggly
beard on the face; the shell holes become pockmarked skin. Only at the end does the poet’s
personal conflict become clear. Owen identifies himself as the severed head of a caterpillar and
the many legs, still moving blindly, as the men of his command from whom he has been
separated. The putrefying face, the sickening voraciousness of the caterpillars, and the utter
desolation of the ruined landscape become symbolic of the lost hopes for humanity.

“Strange Meeting,” another poem with a dreamlike frame, differs from those just described in its
meditative tone and its less—concentrated use of figurative language. Two figures—the poet and
the man he killed—gradually recognize each other and their similarity when they meet in the
shadows of hell. In the background one becomes aware of multitudes of huddled sleepers,
slightly moaning in their “encumbered” sleep—all men killed in “titanic wars.” Because the
second man speaks almost exclusively of death’s thwarting of his purpose and ambition as a
poet, he probably represents Owen’s alter ego. Neither figure is differentiated by earthly
association, and the “strange friend” may also represent an Everyman figure, suggesting the
universality of the tragedy of war. The poem closes as the second speaker stops halfway through
the last line to return to his eternal sleep. The abrupt halt drives home the point that killing a poet
cuts off the promise of the one more line of poetry he might have written. The last line extends
“the Pity of war” to a universal pity for all those who have been diminished through the ages by
art which might have been created and was not.

Sassoon called “Strange Meeting” Owen’s masterpiece, the finest elegy by a soldier who fought
in World War I. T.S. Eliot, who praised it as “one of the most moving pieces of verse inspired by
the war,” recognized that its emotional power lies in Owen’s “technical achievement of great
originality.” In “Strange Meeting,” Owen sustains the dreamlike quality by a complex musical
pattern, which unifies the poem and leads to an overwhelming sense of war’s waste and a sense
of pity that such conditions should continue to exist. John Middleton Murry in 1920 noted the
extreme subtlety in Owen’s use of couplets employing assonance and dissonance. Most readers,
he said, assumed the poem was in blank verse but wondered why the sound of the words
produced in them a cumulative sadness and inexorable uneasiness and why such effects lingered.
Owen’s use of slant-rhyme produces, in Murry’s words, a “subterranean ... forged unity, a
welded, inexorable massiveness.”

Although Owen does not use the dream frame in “Futility,” this poem, like “Strange Meeting,” is
also a profound meditation on the horrifying significance of war. As in “Exposure,” the
elemental structure of the universe seems out of joint. Unlike the speaker in “Exposure,”
however, this one does not doubt that spring will come to warm the frozen battlefield, but he
wonders why it should. Even the vital force of the universe—the sun’s energy—no longer
nurtures life.

One of the most perfectly structured of Owen’s poems, “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” convinced
Sassoon in October 1917 that Owen was not only a “promising minor poet” but a poet with
“classic and imaginative serenity” who possessed “impressive affinities with Keats.” By using
the fixed form of the sonnet, Owen gains compression and a close interweaving of symbols. In
particular, he uses the break between octave and sestet to deepen the contrast between themes,
while at the same time he minimizes that break with the use of sound patterns that continue
throughout the poem and with the image of a bugle, which unifies three disparate groups of
symbols. The structure depends, then, not only on the sonnet form but on a pattern of echoing
sounds from the first line to the last, and upon Owen’s careful organization of groups of symbols
and of two contrasting themes—in the sestet the mockery of doomed youth, “dying like cattle,”
and in the octave the silent personal grief which is the acceptable response to immense tragedy.
The symbols in the octave suggest cacophony; the visual images in the sestet suggest silence.
The poem is unified throughout by a complex pattern of alliteration and assonance. Despite its
complex structure, this sonnet achieves an effect of impressive simplicity.

Poems (1920), edited by Sassoon, established Owen as a war poet before public interest in the
war had diminished in the 1920s. The Poems of Wilfred Owen (1931), edited by Blunden,
aroused much more critical attention, especially that of W.H. Auden and the poets in his circle,
Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis, Christopher Isherwood, and Louis MacNeice. Blunden thought
that Auden and his group were influenced primarily by three poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins,
T.S. Eliot, and Wilfred Owen. The Auden group saw in Owen’s poetry the incisiveness of
political protest against injustice, but their interest in Owen was less in the content of his poems
than in his artistry and technique. Though they were moved by the human experience described
in Owen’s best poems and understood clearly his revulsion toward war, they were appalled by
the sheer waste of a great poet dying just as he had begun to realize fully his potential. Dylan
Thomas, who, like Owen, possessed a brilliant metaphorical imagination, pride in Welsh
ancestry, and an ability to dramatize in poetry his psychic experience, saw in Owen “a poet of all
times, all places, and all wars. There is only one war, that of men against men.”

C. Day Lewis, in the introduction to The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen (1963), judiciously
praised Owen’s poems for “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.” Day Lewis’s view that Owen’s poems
were “certainly the finest written by any English poet of the First War” is incontestable. With
general agreement critics—J. Middleton Murry, Bonamy Dobree, Hoxie Fairchild, Ifor Evans,
Kenneth Muir, and T.S. Eliot, for example—have written of his work for six decades. The best
of Owen’s 1917-1918 poems are great by any standard. Day Lewis’s conclusion that they also
are “probably the greatest poems about the war in our literature” may, if anything, be too
tentative. His work will remain central in any discussion of war poetry or of poetry employing
varied kinds of slant rhyme.  

Bibliography

Selected Books

 Poems, edited by Siegfried Sassoon (London: Chatto & Windus, 1920; New York:
Huebsch, 1921).
 The Poems of Wilfred Owen, edited by Edmund Blunden (Chatto & Windus, 1931; New
York: Viking, 1931).
 Thirteen Poems (Northampton, Mass.: Gehenna Press, 1956).
 The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, edited by C. Day Lewis (Chatto & Windus, 1963;
New York: New Directions, 1964).
 War Poems and Others, edited by Dominic Hibberd (Chatto & Windus, 1973).
 Ten War Poems (Oxford: Taurus Press, 1974).
 Wilfred Owen: The Complete Poems and Fragments, edited by Jon Stallworthy (New
York: Random House, 1983).

Periodical Publications

 "Song of Songs," anonymous, Hydra: Journal of the Craiglockhart War Hospital, no. 10
(1 September 1917).
 "The Next War," anonymous, Hydra: Journal of the Craiglockhart War Hospital, no. 11
(29 September 1917).

Letters

 Collected Letters of Wilfred Owen, edited by John Bell and Harold Owen (Oxford
University Press, 1967).

Further Readings

Bibliography

•   William White, "Wilfred Owen (1893-1918): A Bibliography," Serif (2 December 1965): 5-
16.

Biography
•   Harold Owen, Journey From Obscurity: Wilfred Owen, 1893-1918, 3 volumes (London &
New York: Oxford University Press, 1963-1965).

•   Guy Cuthbertson, Wilfred Owen, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).

References

•   Sven Bäckman, Tradition Transformed, Lund Studies in English, no. 54 (Lund: Gleerup,
1979).

•   Bernard Bergonzi, Heroes' Twilight (London: Constable, 1965), pp. 121-135.

•   Paul Fussell, The Great War in Modern Memory (London & New York: Oxford University
Press, 1975), pp. 285-299.

•   Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (London: Cape, 1929; New York: Cape & Smith, 1930).

•   Dominic Hibberd, Wilfred Owen (London: Longman, 1975).

•   John Johnston, English Poetry of the First World War (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1964), pp. 155-212.

•   Arthur Lane, An Adequate Response (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972).

•   Jon Silkin, Out of Battle: The Poetry of the Great War (London: Oxford University Press,
1972), pp. 197-248.

•   Jon Stallworthy, Wilfred Owen (London: Chatto & Windus, 1974).

•   D. S. R. Welland, Wilfred Owen: A Critical Study (London: Chatto & Windus, 1960).

•   Gertrude White, Wilfred Owen (New York: Twayne, 1969).

The major repository for manuscripts of Owen's poems is the British Museum. Owen's letters are
at the University of Texas, Austin.