With an Introduction by Siegfried Sassoon
52 lines✦
Note on text: Italicized words or phrases are capitalized.Lines longer than 78 characters are broken and the continuationis indented two spaces.] Introduction In writing an Introduction such as this it is good to be brief. Thepoems printed in this book need no preliminary commendations from me oranyone else. The author has left us his own fragmentary but impressiveForeword; this, and his Poems, can speak for him, backed by theauthority of his experience as an infantry soldier, and sustained bynobility and originality of style. All that was strongest in WilfredOwen survives in his poems; any superficial impressions of hispersonality, any records of his conversation, behaviour, or appearance,would be irrelevant and unseemly. The curiosity which demands suchmorsels would be incapable of appreciating the richness of his work. The discussion of his experiments in assonance and dissonance (of which'Strange Meeting' is the finest example) may be left to the professionalcritics of verse, the majority of whom will be more preoccupied withsuch technical details than with the profound humanity of the self-revelation manifested in such magnificent lines as those at the end ofhis 'Apologia pro Poemate Meo', and in that other poem which he named'Greater Love'. The importance of his contribution to the literature of the War cannotbe decided by those who, like myself, both admired him as a poet andvalued him as a friend. His conclusions about War are so entirely inaccordance with my own that I cannot attempt to judge his work with anycritical detachment. I can only affirm that he was a man of absoluteintegrity of mind. He never wrote his poems (as so many war-poets did)to make the effect of a personal gesture. He pitied others; he did notpity himself. In the last year of his life he attained a clear visionof what he needed to say, and these poems survive him as his true andsplendid testament. Wilfred Owen was born at Oswestry on 18th March 1893. He was educatedat the Birkenhead Institute, and matriculated at London University in1910. In 1913 he obtained a private tutorship near Bordeaux, where heremained until 1915. During this period he became acquainted with theeminent French poet, Laurent Tailhade, to whom he showed his earlyverses, and from whom he received considerable encouragement. In 1915,in spite of delicate health, he joined the Artists' Rifles O.T.C., wasgazetted to the Manchester Regiment, and served with their 2nd Battalionin France from December 1916 to June 1917, when he was invalided home.Fourteen months later he returned to the Western Front and served withthe same Battalion, ultimately commanding a Company. He was awarded the Military Cross for gallantry while taking part insome heavy fighting on 1st October. He was killed on 4th November 1918,while endeavouring to get his men across the Sambre Canal. A month before his death he wrote to his mother: "My nerves are inperfect order. I came out again in order to help these boys; directly,by leading them as well as an officer can; indirectly, by watching theirsufferings that I may speak of them as well as a pleader can." Let hisown words be his epitaph:-- "Courage was mine, and I had mystery;Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery."
✦