Owen the Poet

by Dominic Hibberd

Wilfred Owen's poetry is now very widely known as the finest that came out of the First World War. But much about the poet and his work has not been fully understood. This book, based on unrivalled research, is the first to study of Owen's complete poetic achievement, revealing the uniqueness, strangeness and unity of what he called his 'poethood'. His war poems are shown to be a consistent development from his prewar verse and his unswerving allegiance to Romanticism; they grew out of a pattern of mythologised secret experience that took shape in some of his least-known manuscripts before he knew anything of the trenches. Owen lived for poetry; many unfamiliar aspects of that life are brought into focus, including his early discovery of Georgianism, his battle wirh Revivalist religion, his debt to the French Decadence, his alleged cowardice, the torment of his shellshock and the remarkable 'sociological' treatment he received for it, his sexual nature and his friendship with Oscar Wilde's beleaguered disciples in 1918, and his supreme courage in making poetry out of inner horrors deliberately 'recollected in tranquility'. Learning from Wordsworth and Shelley, Aesthetes and Decadents, Sassoon and the Georgians, Hardy, Barbusse, Russell, Edward Carpenter and many others, Owen realised his life's ambition and became a profoundly origianal poet. Owen the Poet ends with chapters on two of his richest 'Strange Meeting', his worst shellshock nightmare, and 'Spring Offensive', the epilogue to all he wrote. Notes, appendixes and bibliography complete what is likely to be the most authoritative book on its subject for many years to come.

Genres: Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Dominic Hibberd was a British author, academic, and broadcaster, best known for his biographies of Wilfred Owen and Harold Monro, as well as his influential anthologies of First World War poetry. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Honorary Fellow of the War Poets Association, he edited key collections including Poetry of the Great War (with John Onions) and contributed extensively to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Educated at Rugby School and King's College, Cambridge, Hibberd taught in the UK, the US, and China before dedicating himself fully to writing.

Reviews

[Falkor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dominic Hibberd, who also wrote Wilfred Owen: A New Biography, focuses on Owen's work in this comprehensive and revealing study of his development as a writer. While many scholars have focused exclusively on Owen's war poetry, Hibberd devotes considerable attention to his pre-war work, unearthing new facts and intriguing connections which allow a fuller understanding of major themes that run throughout Owen’s writing, particularly his difficult relationship with Christianity and his interest in issues related to the body (touch, pain, pleasure, illness, injury). Hibberd also examines Owen’s response to his major literary influences: Keats, Shelley, Swinburne, the French decadent poets (one of whom, Laurent Tailhade, he befriended while living in France before the war), and of course his fellow war poets Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon. A notable feature of the book is the intelligent and sensitive discussion of the impact Owen's homosexuality had on his work, which traces the confusion, guilt and despair that runs through Owen's early poems to his struggle with his sexuality and analyzes how his sexual desires shaped his attitude to the war. Some of the material in this book is included in Hibberd's biography, mostly from the war poetry chapters. Owen the Poet is a well-written companion piece to the biography, well worth reading for those really interested in Owen.

[Shannon McCue · Rating 4 out of 5]

lovely mix of analysis and biography