wilfred owen None of these poems corresponds to the figure of Owen as realist or satirical poet,
thoughthey are fairly representative of the broad characteristics of hisœuvre,both
formally and thematically. Seven further poems were included in Edith Sitwell’s
1919 edition of the anthologyWheels, which she dedicated to the memory of Owen
(‘Strange Meeting’, ‘The Show’, ‘A Terre’, ‘The Sentry’, ‘Disabled’, ‘The Dead Beat’,
‘The Chances’). Her edition ofPoems by Wilfred Owen(1920), remembered for
Sassoon’s introduction and for the inclusion of Owen’s preface, added ‘Futility’
and fifteen further poems, including ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, ‘Insensibility’, ‘Spring
Offensive’, and ‘Mental Cases’. Edmund Blunden’s 1931 ‘New Edition’, included
pre-Craiglockhart poems for the first time, and printed Owen’s ‘table of contents’.
The next edition, C. Day Lewis’sThe Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, appeared in
1963, dividing a further enlarged corpus into an opening section of ‘war poems’
followed by ‘other poems, and fragments’ (to which ‘Miners’ was relegated) and
‘minor poems and juvenilia’. Hibberd’s edition ofWar Poems and Others(1973)
interleaved extracts from letters amongst fifty-three poems sequenced according to
date of composition. The most recent, and still the standard, edition was the fourth
by a poet. Jon Stallworthy ordered the poems by date of final revision. (‘Strange
Meeting’ is the last poem in Blunden, the first in Day Lewis, the third from last
in Hibberd, and rather anonymously mid-table-of-contents in Stallworthy.) While
the amount of data about Owen in circulation has increased, the war poet has not
receded. Having read the first biography, Larkin told Robert Conquest that his
much-admired Owen now ‘seems rather a prick, really’; ‘yet the poems’, seven of
which were printed in Larkin’s revisionistOxford Book of Twentieth-Century English
Verse(1973), ‘stay good’.^23
Familiarity or facility with symbols of the Great War can make for presumptuous
readers, not least through tacit invocations of an ideal type or generic war poet (a
tendency reinforced, in James Campbell’s analysis, by the way in which ‘war poetry
critics have protested the sufferings oftheirsubjects’,^24 substituting apology for
criticism). Owen’s own war was iconic, but in significant ways atypical, not just
because he was a poet before he was a soldier. Most of Owen’s war poems are based
on his experiences in the first five months of 1917. During that time he was in
hospital for six weeks, on a course in the base area for four weeks, and in action for
only about thirty days. His front line service was unusually concentrated and varied.
After helping to defend shattered positions that had hardly moved for more than a
year, he took part in a few days of fast-moving, open warfare, virtually the only such
moment anywhere on the British front between October 1914 and March 1918. He
was never physically wounded, and he endured very little of what is thought of as
the standard Western Front experience, the ghastly monotony of routine trench
(^23) Philip Larkin to Robert Conquest, 9 Jan. 1975, inThe Letters of Philip Larkin, ed. Anthony
Thwaite (London: Faber, 1992), 519.
(^24) James Campbell, ‘Combat Gnosticism: The Ideology of First World War Poetry Criticism’,New
Literary History, 30 (1999), 210.