General Notes:--
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ue to the general circumstances surrounding Wilfred Owen, and his deathone week before the war ended, it should be noted that these poems arenot all in their final form. Owen had only had a few of his poemspublished during his lifetime, and his papers were in a state ofdisarray when Siegfried Sassoon, his friend and fellow poet, puttogether this volume. The 1920 edition was the first edition of Owen'spoems, the 1921 reprint (of which this is a transcript) added onemore--and nothing else happened until Edmund Blunden's 1931 edition.Even with that edition, there remained gaps, and several more editionsadded more and more poems and fragments, in various forms, as it wasdifficult to tell which of Owen's drafts were his final ones, until JonStallworthy's "Complete Poems and Fragments" (1983) included all thatcould be found, and tried to put them in chronological order, with thelatest revisions, etc. Therefore, it should not be surprising if some or most of these poemsdiffer from later editions. After Owen's death, his writings gradually gained pre-eminence, so that,although virtually unknown during the war, he came into high regard.Benjamin Britten, the British composer who set nine of Owen's works asthe text of his "War Requiem" (shortly after the Second World War),called Owen "by far our greatest war poet, and one of the most originalpoets of this century." (Owen is especially noted for his use ofpararhyme.) Five of those nine texts are some form of poems includedhere, to wit: 'Anthem for Doomed Youth', 'Futility', 'Parable of the OldMen and the Young', 'The End', and 'Strange Meeting'. The other fourwere '[Bugles Sang]', 'The Next War', 'Sonnet [Be slowly lifted up]' and'At a Calvary Near the Ancre'--all of which the reader may wish topursue, being some of Owen's finest work. Fortunately, the poem which Iconsider his best, and which is one of his most quoted--'Dulce etDecorum est', is included in this volume.
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