A restrained, perfectly modulated biography of the young English
officer whose apparently mediocre poetic talents erupted into
genius in the trenches of the Somme. Stallworthy depicts Owen,
before he became one of the men who marched away, as a pleasantly
ordinary young man who wrote wholly conventional poetry - highly
idealized, self-consciously rhetorical stuff - throughout his
adolescence. From boyhood Owen's idol was Keats, whose
over-refined, hypochondriac sensibilities he shared. Though the
Owen family was a close and happy one, Wilfred's father worried
about the young aesthete who had no "practical" career plans. Not
until 1916 did Wilfred enlist. He was sent to the Front in France
and his first letters home describe the conditions he was to endure
for several months: "Mud. It has penetrated now into that Sanctuary
my sleeping bag, and that holy of holies my pyjamas." The aesthete
spent his days under machine-gun fire in a dugout two feet high
with cold, stinking water. After seeing his company decimated, Owen
was diagnosed by a doctor as suffering from neurasthenia and
shipped to Craiglockheart hospital in Edinburgh. There he met - and
was immediately drawn to - the poet Siegfried Sassoon who had been
labeled as suffering from hallucinations after he threw his
Military Cross into the Mersey. At Craiglockhart, listening to the
nocturnal moans of soldiers tormented by the nightmares that were
the legacy of the battlefield, Owen wrote one of the most famous
literary manifestoes of the 20th century: "This book is not about
heroes. . . . Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about
glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion or power, except War. Above
all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War and the pity
of War." In the few months he had left to live the change in Owen's
style was complete. From overblown romanticism he moved to poems
that were stark and compressed - an unbearably tactile poetry of
pockmarked earth, maimed creatures and "the sour sharp odour of the
shell." Stallworthy avoids all sentimentality just as the author of
An Anthem For Doomed Youth would have wanted it. (Kirkus Reviews)
This biography is more than a simple account of Wilfred Owen's life -- the childhood spent in the backstreets of Birkenhead and Shrewsbury, the appalling months in the trenches -- it is a poet's enquiry into the workings of a poet's mind. This paperback reproduces all the widely praised illustrations of the original edition, including drawings by the poet and facsimile manuscripts of many of his greatest poems.
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