Abstract
In the unfinished Preface to what seems to have been intended as a volume of his war poems Wilfred Owen wrote:
This book is not about heroes. English Poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.
Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War.
Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.
My subject is War, and the pity of War.
The poetry is in the pity.
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Notes
See Dominic Hibberd (ed.), Wilfred Owen: War Poems and Others (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973) p. 120.
D. H. Lawrence, ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’, Phoenix, ed. Edward D. McDonald (London: Heinemann, 1936) p. 420.
Cf. Paul Nash’s letter of November 1917 describing ‘the most frightful nightmare of a country more conceived by Dante or Poe than by nature’, quoted by D. S. R. Welland, Wilfred Owen (London: Chatto & Windus, 1960) p. 30.
Elizabeth Ward, David Jones: Mythmaker (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983) pp. 80–3
Edna Longley, ‘“Shit or Bust”: The Importance of Keith Douglas’, Poetry in the Wars (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1986) p. 111.
An exception to the view that Douglas is a precursor to Hughes is to be found in Donald Davie’s ‘Remembering the Desert’, Under Briggflatts (Manchester: Carcanet, 1989).
Bernard Bergonzi, Heroes’ Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1965; reprinted 1980) p. 125.
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© 1999 R. P. Draper
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Draper, R.P. (1999). Poetry of Two World Wars. In: An Introduction to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27433-8_5
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