Wilfred Owen is the poet of pity, the voice of the soldier maimed, blinded, traumatised and killed, not just in the Great War, but in all wars since, so resonant has his message become. Although he saw only five of his poems published in his lifetime, he left behind a portfolio of poetry and letters that created a powerful legacy. This generously illustrated book tells the story of Wilfred Owen's life and work anew, from his birth in 1893 until his death one week before the Armistice on 4 November 1918. It chronicles Owen's journey from a romantic youth, steeped in the poetry of Keats, to mature soldier awakened to the horrors of the Western Front. Drawing on rich archival material such as personal books, artefacts, family photographs and numerous manuscripts, the volume takes a fresh look at Owen's apprenticeship and eventual mastery of poetry, giving a comprehensive view of the relationship between his lived experience and his writing. Those already familiar with or well-versed in Owen's work will find new material in this book, and those coming to Owen for the first time will enjoy a well researched, yet accessible, illustrated introduction to one of the twentieth century's greatest poets.

From Homer to Heaney, the voices of men and women have seldom been more piercing, more poignant, than in time of conflict. For fifty years, Jon Stallworthy has been attuned to such voices. In Survivors' Songs he explores a series of poetic encounters with war, with essays on Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and others. Beautifully written, this moving book sets the poetry and prose of the First World War and its aftermath in the wider context of writing about warfare from prehistoric Troy to Anglo-Saxon England; from Agincourt to Flanders; from El Alamein to Vietnam; from the wars of yesterday to the wars of tomorrow.

No poetry has touched readers' hearts more deeply than the soldier poets of the First World War. Published to commemorate the centenary of 1914, this stunning set of books, with specially commissioned covers by leading print makers, is an essential gathering of our most beloved war poets introduced by leading poets and biographers of our present day. Dying at twenty-five, a week before the end of the First World War, Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) has come to represent a generation of young men sacrificed - as it seems to the next generation, one in unprecedented rebellion against its fathers - by guilty old men: generals, politicians, profiteers. Owen has now taken his place in literary history as perhaps the first, certainly the quintessential, war poet.

Body language and the body of language - from the first words in the first garden to the last words of last night's lovers - are the entwined themes of Jon Stallworthy's new collection of poems, his first since The Guest from the Future (1995), described by Poetry Review as 'snatches of radio traffic from this century's storms, true stories ...and some of the storytelling inspired'. The centrepiece of the book is 'Skyhorse', an ambitious poem that finds the White Horse on the Berkshire Downs an enduring presence through three millennia of English history.

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets in our literature. Dying at twenty-five, a week before the end of the First World War, Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) has come to represent a generation of young men sacrificed - as it seems to the next generation, one in unprecedented rebellion against its fathers - by guilty old men: generals, politicians, profiteers. Owen has now taken his place in literary history as perhaps the first, certainly the quintessential, war poet.

'Orpheus, the pagan saint of poets, went through hell and came back singing. In twentieth-century mythology, the singer wears a steel helmet and makes his descent "down some profound dull tunnel" in the stinking mud of the Western Front. For most readers of English poetry, the face under that helmet is that of Wilfred Owen.' Professor Jon Stallworthy, from his Introduction. When Wilfred Owen was killed in the days before the Armistice in 1918, he left behind a shattering, truthful and indelible record of a soldier's experience of the First World War. His greatest war poetry has been collected, edited and introduced here by Professor Jon Stallworthy. This special edition is published to commemorate the end of the hellish war that Owen, though the hard-won truth and terrible beauty of his poetry, has taught us never to forget.

This selection of Wilfred Owen's war poems is being published partly to provide an ideal edition of the poems for schools, who essentially read the war poems and need a short, thorough edition. It contains a new introduction by Jon Stallworthy, which is aimed at a general audience, but will be thorough and academic enough to work for schoolsas well. Constable have a similar edition planned, but Chatto's will be out first, and contains copyright material unavailable to other editions.

From Homer to Heaney, the voices of men and women have seldom been more piercing, more poignant, than in time of conflict. For fifty years, Jon Stallworthy has been attuned to such voices. In Survivors" Songs he explores a series of poetic encounters with war, with essays on Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and others. Beautifully written, this moving book sets the poetry and prose of the First World War and its aftermath in the wider context of writing about warfare from prehistoric Troy to Anglo-Saxon England; from Agincourt to Flanders; from El Alamein to Vietnam; from the wars of yesterday to the wars of tomorrow.

There can be no area of human experience that has generated a wider range of powerful feelings than war. Jon Stallworthy's classic and celebrated anthology spans centuries of human experience of war, from Homer's Iliad, through the First and Second World Wars, the Vietnam War, and the wars fought since. This new edition, published to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, includes a new introduction and additional poems from David Harsent and Peter Wyton amongst others. The new selection provides improved coverage of the two World Wars and the Vietnam War, and new coverage of the wars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

There can be no area of human experience that has generated a wider range of powerful feelings than war. Jon Stallworthy's classic and celebrated anthology spans centuries of human experience of war, from Homer's Iliad, through the First and Second World Wars, the Vietnam War, and the wars fought since. This new edition, published to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, includes a new introduction and additonal poems from David Harsent and Peter Wyton, amongst others. The new selection provides improved coverage of the two World Wars and the Vietnam War, and new coverage of the wars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

A 70-year-old friend told Jon Stallworthy of her flight from war-torn Poland, carrying in her bedding-roll a coverlet she'd been embroidering for her fiance and herself. The poet was struck by the story's inverse relationship with that of the "Lady of Shalott". Where Tennyson's artist in her tower, forced to choose between the world and its "shadows" in her mirror, opts for the world and is destroyed, the peasant engages with the world and is sustained, art reflecting the engagement. The story Stallworthy traces over the outline of the old illustrates what Heaney calls poetry's power of "redress". This collection of poems evokes survivors, including the poet Anna Akhmatova, the painter Francoise Gilot - Picasso's mistress, and a survivor of the siege at Stalingrad. Each poem engages with an earlier one, such as Akhmatova's "Poem Without a Hero" and Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin".

From the civilization of the Lower Nile to that of the Lower Hudson, more poets have written more convincingly, more poignantly about love than about any other subject. Jon Stallworthy has here selected some of the most moving, funny, shameless, and erotic love poems in the English language. Representing the work of more than 190 poets, from Sappho to Byron and Browning, from Rossetti to Wordsworth and E.E. Cummings, he offers a startling collection of love poetry down through the ages. Arranged thematically, beginning with the first drawings of young love and ending with the "long look back" of the aged, and revealing love in all its differrent aspects and perversities, this anthology demonstrates vividly man's changeless responses to the changing seasons of the heart.

"Stallworthy's book of love poetry, ranging across more than twenty centuries of writing about love 'till the stars have run away' establishes beyond the eye-shadow of a doubt that love is, has been and always will be blind."--Christian Science Monitor

"A very thorough job...eccentric and entertaining."--Times Literary Supplement (London)

This new selection brings together the poetry of three of the most distinctive and moving voices to emerge from the First World War. Here are the controlled passion and rich metaphors of Wilfred Owen's celebrated verses such as 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' and 'Strange Meeting', along with many of his lesser-known works. The elegiac poems of Ivor Gurney, including 'Requiem' and 'The Silent One', reflect his love of language, music and landscape, while the visceral works of Isaac Rosenberg, such as 'Break of Day in the Trenches', are filled with stark imagery but also, as in 'Louse Hunting', with vitality and humour. Each poet reflects the disparate experiences of ordinary soldiers in war, and attempts to capture man's humanity in the most inhumane of circumstances.

Perhaps best known for his much anthologized World War II poem, "Naming of Parts", and a number of radio plays and translations from the Italian, Henry Reed published only one volume of verse during his lifetime, "A Map of Verona" in 1946. Jon Stallworthy's introduction traces Reed's life and offers a critical assessment of the published and many unpublished poems, the "Lessons of the War", translations, songs, and early fragments included in this "Collected Poems" that should help establish Reed alongside the other great war poets.

It represents what Seamus Heaney, the Nobel Laureate in literature, called art's power of "redress." Stallworthy's poems evoke women survivors; the poet Anna Akhmatova; the painter Francoise Cilot, Picasso's lover; a survivor of the siege of Stalingrad; and a woman who escaped war torn Poland, carrying in her bedding-roll a coverlet she was embroidering for her fiance and herself. This refugee's story bears a curious inverse relationship with that of the "Lady of Shalott": Tennyson's patrician artist in her tower, forced to choose between the world and its "shadows" in her mirror opts for the world and is destroyed; Stallworthy's peasant artist engages with the world and is sustained by an art that reflects that engagement.