The Poems of Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen

Poetry The First World War

Wilfred Owen's poems give voice to soldiers' experience through bodily detail, troubled memory and bitter irony.

Read the book Contents

Length: 25 poems
Reading time: About 24 min
Words: 5,820

About the book

The collection opens in a dugout under shellfire, where mud, darkness and sudden injury give war an immediate physical presence. Another poem turns soldiers' talk about their chances into a grim calculation. Familiar speech shares the page with carefully worked poetic form.

Owen's attention to breath, sound and damaged bodies resists a distant view of combat. The poems also ask what can be said afterwards, and how one person's suffering can be communicated to another. Their force often comes from the tension between an expected phrase and the experience that interrupts it.

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Poetry The First World War

This edition

Text from Standard Ebooks, who proofread and typeset it and dedicate their edition to the public domain. Wilfred Owen died more than 70 years ago, so the work is out of copyright in the UK. Includes the original introduction, preface.