The War Poems of Wilfred Owen

"This is a book that was bought for me in 1997 by my wife on our second Christmas together. She knew that I loved his poetry. I have loved this poetry since I was a child because my grandfather was a First World War veteran and my father wanted to try and understand what he went through. So my father read them and when I was a child I would look at the book as well. And then at school my headmaster liked Wilfred Owen a lot too Owen was killed in the last month of the war as a young lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment. If you look at his face (there is a photo of him on the front of this book), you will see it is a very sensitive face. I think he found war terrifying and emotionally draining and in many respects he wrote poetry to try and explain some of the things that he was seeing. I will just read you three lines from the preface to his book which he wrote in May of 1918. Above all I am not concerned with poetry. My subject is war and the pity of war. And the poetry is in the pity. And, actually, what he really does address in all of his poems about the First World War is the utter pity of it all. Yes, absolutely. What I see is that he was constantly addressing the utter, utter stupidity of warfare and certainly the amount of human damage that lies in the wake of all of these events, whether it’s Darfur, Bosnia, or Cambodia. He was addressing the catastrophic human effect – wasted lives, young people being forced to fight an absolutely appalling war and often losing their lives and the effect that it has on generations. You have got to remember that an entire generation of people were wiped out in the First World War. So, yes, I do see parallels and I do see the effects on society in places like Cambodia."

"It may seem odd. You may ask what war poems have got to do with reportage. But in this case they have a lot. There are not many poems by Owen as he died so young. He died venerably in his early twenties the Sunday before the armistice in 1918. But he wrote so vividly of war. I think he’s the most influential writer in English in the whole of the 20th century. This body of work shows you the reality of war. And I think before 1914, the British people tended to take a Boy’s Own Paper view of warfare – it was a glorious enterprise, medals were to be won, you tested yourself and so on. When the reality of life in the trenches, which Owen describes so vividly, became known, the view of war as a terrible waste of time and lives entered the national bloodstream and it really stayed there until the end of the century because it was reinforced by the dreadful events of the Second World War. Only in the late 1990s did you get a generation of British politicians coming to power who had no experience of that and they then tended to embark on the types of military adventures that we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan and so on. I had a battered edition I used to carry around with me. Owen speaks to me about the reality of warfare more than any other book about war. It’s more than a hundred years since the beginning of the Great War but that body of work endures. And I think that our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, whatever these are or were, they will not be victories. And the bodies coming home, the Wootton Bassett effect if you like [after the English town where military processions were held], has drawn us back to the work of the likes of [Siegfried] Sassoon and Owen and we question the rationale for going to war, we question whether warfare is in itself a glorious enterprise. This book in particular, his Anthem for Doomed Youth and the others, stand as monuments, in my mind, to the reality of warfare. Everything I have seen on the world’s battlefields I have seen through that light. Yes. My favourite is Anthem for Doomed Youth. “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.”"

"He became the quintessential war poet, certainly in a British context. Not during his lifetime. But in England, Owen is a poet that everyone will have encountered in some way. He was born in 1893, and famously—this is part of the legend of Owen—he died just a week before the end of the war, on the 4th of November, 1918. His parents got the telegram telling them that he had died on the 11th of November as the bells were ringing to celebrate the end of the war. Owen’s poetry sometimes gets described as ‘anti-war’. I don’t think I’d go that far. It’s important to note that he was not a conscientious objector, he was in uniform. He won a Military Cross. So he was actually quite a successful soldier, later on in his service. But he is a poet who highlights the horror of the war for many people, and is sceptical of ideas of heroism, service, duty, and all those other concepts brought to the fore by the government, church, and the right-wing press in terms of encouraging people to join up. It combines realism—an almost journalistic, unblinking focus on the realities—with very poetic language, which partly came from the strong influence of the Romantics , particularly Keats, who was the poet he was almost in love with. Saying that, there’s also interest from some people into Owen’s sexuality. This has been quite a controversial topic, but it gives the poetry another dimension if we see him as a gay poet. There is not a lot of evidence of him having sexual relationships, but certainly he is interested in men, especially young men suffering; he takes quite a corporeal interest in their bodies and in the idea of strong, young men being killed. There are some poems that I think are quite clearly gay poems, and put in context are probably about male sex workers. It’s just another dimension to Owen’s work. Owen’s poetry got picked up during the 1920s and 1930s. But it was really after the second war when Owen became the poet. In the 1960s, with Benjamin Britten and the Vietnam War , that’s when he started turning up on school curricula… He has an interesting identity as he can be used by both right and left, pro-war and anti-war, establishment and anti-establishment. He’s a radical voice, a disaffected youth longing for a better world, and also a successful soldier, a good officer who cares for his men and dies in battle fighting for his country. So some of his success has been because of this capacity to appeal to all sorts of different people. He’s often misrepresented and misread as well, of course. In some ways you can refashion him to suit your particular worldview. An important thing about Owen is that although he’s seen as the poet of the trenches, actually most of his poetry was written in England or Scotland, not in France. He’s writing after he’s been fighting, or before he will be fighting. The most important phase in his life, really, was when he was at Craiglockhart Hospital, just outside Edinburgh. That’s where he met Siegfried Sassoon and J.B. Salmond—who was in the Scottish anthology. Salmond, was a graduate of St Andrews and a journalist. They produced a magazine at the hospital together. Owen talks about Craiglockhart as his “free and easy Oxford,” because he didn’t get to go to university—a great regret of his—but he ended up at this hospital, where he had a lot of leisure time and was surrounded by educated officers who spent a lot of time talking about books. The he went into Edinburgh and hung out with all the Bohemian artists of the time. Then to Scarborough, Ripon after that, and that’s when all the war poems really got written. It was not a man in a trench, scribbling while shells were flying all around. Some of the poems are about the home front, and consciously so. Others are about the war, but written from memory, in a state of comfort. Edward Thomas is also a war poet at the home front."