Go here to read a really interesting article about Wilfred Owen from the Telegraph. It is by Jeremy Paxman and it is well worth reading. I have put an extract below. Thanks to Mikey for the tip.
Jeremy Paxman on the extraordinary achievement of Wilfred Owen, who abominated war yet died a great warrior.
For me, he is the greatest of all the war poets. But there is nothing original in my enthusiasm.
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| Owen developed intense respect for the soldier |
I don’t suppose there’s a thoughtful student in the land who is unaware of Wilfred Owen’s best-known poem, “Dulce et Decorum Est”.
Indeed, it tells us something about our pervading cynicism that Horace’s words are now taken more readily as sarcasm than at face value.
It is often assumed – as a student, I made the mistake myself – that the poem’s author was some sort of bitter, jaundiced pacifist. But the enigma of Wilfred Owen is that he was anything but that. The fascination of his life is his embodiment of contradictions.
It is true that he was not among the first to answer the call to bash the Boche. Indeed, he seems to have been a rather fey and precious young man, first as a vicar’s assistant in Berkshire, and then as an English teacher in France.
When he finally decided to join the Army (through the Artists’ Rifles, to fit with his own idea of himself as a poet, despite the fact that he was unpublished, and, frankly, not very good, either) he was repulsed by the coarseness of the men among whom he found himself.
But his letters to his mother – our main source of information about his life – show how much he changed. Initial distaste at the vulgarity of the sweaty, noisy men among whom he was obliged to live became a genuine love.
By the end of the First World War, he had become not only their advocate but a true military hero himself.
english@cc 