Of all the poets of the First World War, Wilfred Owen most fires the imagination today – this is the comprehensive literary biography of the greatest WW1 poet Wilfred Owen tragically died in battle just a few days before the Armistice. Now, during the centenary year of his death, this biography honours Owen’s brief yet remarkable life, and the enduring legacy he left. Stallworthy covers his life from the childhood spent in the backstreets of Shrewsbury to the appalling final months in the trenches. More than a simple account of his life, it is also a poet's enquiry into the workings of a poet's mind. This revised edition contains the beautiful illustrations of the original edition, including the drawings by Owen and facsimile manuscripts of his greatest poems, as well as a new preface by the author. ‘One of the finest biographies of our time.’ Graham Greene ‘An outstanding book, a worthy memorial to its subject.’ Kingsley Amis ‘As lovingly detailed as the records of Owen's short life permit, but it is always fascinatingly readable, in fact engrossing.’ Sunday Telegraph
A wonderfully illustrated collection of critical analysis of poetry from World War I commemorates the great poetic voices produced by this terrible conflict, including such noted writers as Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owe, Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, Charles Hamilton Sorley, Robert Graves, Julian Grenfell, and other notables.
Jon Stallworthy wrote his first poems during schooldays shadowed by the Second World War and a mother's memories of a brother and friends killed in the First. He would go on to publish an award-winning biography of Wilfred Owen and to edit the Oxford Book of War Poetry. This book brings together the poems he has written throughout his career in response to the wars that scarred the twentieth century. The title poem, previously uncollected, sheds piercing light on the dark aftermath of the conflict so bitterly remembered today, a century on, as the war to end wars'.
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.
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.
A biography of the Irish poet, Louis MacNeice, contemporary and friend of W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day Lewis. Jon Stallworthy is the author of a prize-winning biography of Wilfred Owen, and editor of a volume of his collected poems.
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.
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