Poems from Hell
Aug. 22nd, 2024 02:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileI don’t know if it was the rainy weather or what during my trip to Maine but after reading The Silent People I decided I had not had enough depressing reading for that trip, so I started the saddest book I had brought: The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. I remembered one or two of them from high school English and the poetry survey I took in college, especially “Dulce et Decorum Est,” which I’m pretty sure is the most famous.
This collection was very good for rounding out my picture of the man behind the poems; it has a good long introduction and timeline of Owen’s life and an appendix that I think was an introduction to an earlier published collection of his works, which features a lot of excerpts from his letters. This was interesting to me just as additional historical background on World War One, but it also does tie in what was going on when specific poems were being drafted, which is pretty cool. The poems themselves are split up into three segments: the first is war poetry, which is what Owen was most famous for; the second is fragments and unfinished poems; and the third is his juvenilia/pre-war poetry, which is interesting but quite frankly not as good.
The war poems are pretty harrowing. That is, after all, the point, and they are executed brilliantly. There’s not really anything new that my sheltered ass can say about them; they are correctly and widely acknowledged as being some of the best English war poems, in a war that produced a large body of excellent poetry.
This collection was very good for rounding out my picture of the man behind the poems; it has a good long introduction and timeline of Owen’s life and an appendix that I think was an introduction to an earlier published collection of his works, which features a lot of excerpts from his letters. This was interesting to me just as additional historical background on World War One, but it also does tie in what was going on when specific poems were being drafted, which is pretty cool. The poems themselves are split up into three segments: the first is war poetry, which is what Owen was most famous for; the second is fragments and unfinished poems; and the third is his juvenilia/pre-war poetry, which is interesting but quite frankly not as good.
The war poems are pretty harrowing. That is, after all, the point, and they are executed brilliantly. There’s not really anything new that my sheltered ass can say about them; they are correctly and widely acknowledged as being some of the best English war poems, in a war that produced a large body of excellent poetry.