Opusculum

The centenary of the death of Lieutenant W. E. S. Owen, M.C. of the 2nd Battalion, Manchester Regiment is unlikely to go unnoticed today. Lieutenant Owen was killed in action on the 4th November 1918, aged 25, during the crossing of the Sambre-Oise Canal and he is buried in Ors Communal Cemetery in France. In Shropshire, a programme of events, known as Wilfred Owen 100, has already been running for around three months [1].

Today, Wilfred Owen is probably the most well-known British soldier-poet of the First World War. Despite this, circumstances dictated that very little of Owen’s poetry was actually published in his own lifetime. While Owen’s poetic reputation was firmly established in the decades that immediately followed the war, some recent scholars have argued that his current importance in British popular culture owes as much to the 1960s as it does to the First World War.

For example, a recent post by Professor Harry Ricketts on the University of Oxford’s World War I Centenary: Continuations and Beginnings blog has argued that Owen was, essentially, a poet of the “turbulent 1960s.” In the post, Ricketts claimed that it was the sixties that transformed Owen from a relatively obscure poet into a household name [2]:

The claim for Owen as, in essence, a poet of the ’60s, might seem initially quirky, but is, I think, in its own terms, unanswerable. Of course, his war poems had always (so viscerally) dramatised World War I as a kind of hellish cockpit, with the imagined reader a pitying spectator watching, often in appalled close-up, the actions of unwilling victims subject to irresistible human, mechanical, chemical and political forces. The poems had always been that. But it was the 1960s which allowed that vision to achieve its full horror and pity.

To support his argument, Ricketts cites a wide range of evidence, from Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem (1962) to Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy (1991-95), via Alan Clark’s The Donkeys (1961), the musical Oh! What a Lovely War! (1963), new editions of Owen’s poems and letters (1963, 1967), the BBC’s documentary series The Great War documentary series (1964), and Blackadder Goes Forth (1989).

The argument is not particularly new. For example, in his book The Long Shadow (2013), David Reynolds argued that the 1960s was the decade when the Great War poets became “iconic” [3]. Amongst other things, he attributed this to popular poetry anthologies published to mark the 50th anniversary of the war, e.g. Brian Gardner’s Up the line to death (1964), and I. M. Parsons’s Men who march away (1965). In these anthologies, Reynolds traced the influence of an older interpretive framework — one which he attributed to Edmund Blunden — that both privileged the work of the soldier-poets (over others), and which largely viewed the poetry itself as reflecting a growing realisation of the grim realities of trench warfare as the war progressed [4]:

The fiftieth anniversary anthologies sanctified Blunden’s canon of Great War poetry: the verse of junior officers steeped in Romantic literature who moved from patriotic innocence to horrified candour and eventually a recognition, in Owen’s now clichéd words, of ‘the pity of war’ rather than its glory.

Like Ricketts, Reynolds concluded that, “it was in the 1960s that Owen became the pre-eminent symbol of war poetry for British popular culture” [5]:

Because Owen’s poems spoke so much of suffering and victimhood, they fitted the British experience of the Second World War and 1960s attitudes to war in general better than poetry that focused on the moral ambiguities of fighting and killing.

Naturally, neither Ricketts or Reynolds argue that Owen was completely unknown before the 1960s, just that his current pre-eminence as the war poet dates from that decade. Perhaps as a balance to Ricketts, the Oxford WW1 blog also published a post by Vincent Trott that explained in more detail the reception of Owen’s poetry in the immediate post war period and afterwards [6].

Nevertheless, on the 100th anniversary of Owen’s death, I thought that it might be interesting in this post to explore a few responses to his poetry from the immediate post-war period.

Coterie, No. 3 (1919):

The first example is a short review of a literary journal called Coterie that was published in the Daily Herald of the 31st December 1919. The review is not primarily focused on Owen, but it does favourably mention the one Owen poem published in the anthology: “Mental Cases” [7]:

A LITERARY QUARTERLY
Coterie. No. 3 (Hendersons. 2s, 6d.)
Coterie is a bright quarterly, which contains a great deal of verse, a little prose, and four drawings. The cover design is by William Roberts, one of the most notable of the official war artists. The Editorial Committee includes T. S. Eliot, Richard Aldington, Aldous Huxley, and Wyndham Lewis. Since the contributors belong to several young intellectual sects, Coterie does not represent “a circle of persons associated by exclusive interests” (dictionary definition). This is very much to its credit, and it is refreshing to find Georgians, Imagistes, Athenæumites, Sitwells, and other diagnosable individuals so cheerily collected under one wrapper. Probably the most interesting poem in the book is one by Wilfred Owen, who was killed in action a week before the Armistice. I am glad to know that the rest of the contributors are still with us, although several of them take a somewhat gloomy view of human affairs. Aldington, for instance, in a remarkable poem called “Bones,” queries:–
“What quaint adventures may there be
For my unneeded skeleton?”
But as a cool contrast to this, E. C. Blunden writes serenely about freshwater fish:–
“The rose-finned roach and bluish bream,
And staring perch steal up the stream.”
And Sacheverell Sitwell gives a free-verse dialogue between a rich lady and her gardener, which is undeniably brilliant.
What a relief it is to find poets being witty, instead of maundering on about botany and the weather, washed down (or out), with what might have been their emotions (only they got them from Daddy Wordsworth, who really knew what he was getting excited about). Owing to shortage of space I cannot deal with the emotional vagaries and vicissitudes of the remainder; they are a bit weak at times, but I am sure they don’t mean quite all they write, as when Herbert Read complains:–
“The pendulous trunks of elephants
Disturb my peace of mind.”
Anyhow, I’m longing to see what they’ll say next time.
S.S.

The review was written by Siegfried Sassoon, who was at that time the literary editor of the Daily Herald.

Coterie was a literary journal published in six issues between 1919 and 1920 by Hendersons of 66, Charing Cross Road, London [8]. Each issue contained poetry, mixed with fiction, criticism, and the occasional illustration. According to the Modernist Journals Project, an initiative of Brown University and the University of Tulsa, Coterie was “an important part of the post-war literary and artistic scene in England” [9].

Sassoon seemed pleased that the issue of Coterie that he was reviewing included contributions from several of the different literary groupings that were current at that time. Of the four specific groups that he identified, the “Georgians” and the “Imagists” are probably the most well-known today.

Georgian poetry emerged in the immediate pre-war period, and is often linked to a series of eponymous anthologies edited by Edward Marsh. The first issue had been published in 1912 and contributors included: Lascelles Abercrombie, Rupert Brooke, Walter de la Mare, W. W. Gibson, D. H. Lawrence, John Masefield, and Harold Monro. In trying to define Georgian poetry, Matthew Hollis has written [10]:

The Georgians looked to the local, the commonplace and the day-to-day, mistrusting grandiosity, philosophical enquiry or spiritual cant. […] The style was innocent, intimate and direct; lyric in form, rhythmic in drive, it dovetailed short sketches of the natural world with longer meditations on the condition of the human heart.

Contributors to later issues of Georgian Poetry included the war poets Robert Graves and Edmund Blunden, as well as Sassoon himself. While none of his poems actually appeared in the anthologies, Dominic Hibberd has noted that Owen did personally align himself with the Georgians [11].

Imagism was established, in part as a deliberate reaction against the Georgians, by the American-born poet Ezra Pound. Reynolds explains some of his poetical principles [12]:

Pound advocated free verse, where rhythm and metre were adapted to the emotion the poem sought to convey rather than the other way round, and also ‘permanent metaphor’, using ‘absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation’.

Pound’s first anthology of Imagist poems was published in 1914 under the title, Des Imagistes [13]. Amongst the contributors were Richard Aldington, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), James Joyce, and Pound himself.

Of the other groupings mentioned, the “Athenæumites” were presumably writers associated with The Athenaeum, a weekly literary review that was edited by John Middleton Murry between 1919 and 1923 (in 1921 it merged with The Nation to become The Nation and Athenaeum). In Middleton Murry’s time, the review featured work by T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Clive Bell; Aldous Huxley also briefly became associate editor in 1919 [14]. There seems to be, therefore, at least some overlap between the Bloomsbury Group and Sassoon’s “Athenæumites.” Sassoon’s final group, the “Sitwells,” seems to consider Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell Sitwell as a distinct literary movement of their own!

In practice, the exact boundaries between the different groupings wasn’t always that clear. Reynolds has argued that,”they should be understood not as rival schools but as different currents in the same swirling stream” [15]. That said, Sassoon’s comments in the review about poets “maundering on” about botany or the weather does echo some contemporary Imagist or modernist criticism of Georgian poetry.

In retrospect, Sassoon’s positive comments on Owen’s poem simply highlights that he was not really a neutral reviewer of Owen’s poetry; his support for the development of Owen’s poetry, at Craiglockhart and afterwards, is well known [16]. We also know now that Sassoon had corresponded with Blunden about his poems earlier in 1919 [17]. The Blunden poem quoted in Sassoon’s review was “The Pike,” although the edition of Coterie being reviewed also included his: “An Evensong,” “The Unchangeable,” and “A Waterpiece.”

Poems (1920):

Wilfred Owen’s poems were first published in book form by Chatto and Windus in 1920, the volume including a short introduction by Siegfried Sassoon [18]. This edition included twenty-three poems — including: “Strange Meeting,” “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” and “Dulce et Decorum est” — as well as Owen’s own unfinished preface, with its famous lines: “Above all, this book is not concerned with Poetry. The subject of it is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.”

A broadly-positive review appeared in the Aberdeen Daily Journal of the 24th January 1921 [19]:

POETRY.
Wilfred Owen on War and Slaughter.
POEMS. : By Wilfred Owen. London: Chatto and Windus. 6s.

Wilfred Owen was an Oswestry man who was killed at the age of 25 while endeavouring to get his men across the Sambre Canal on November 4, 1918. He was one of those sensitive and imaginative minds in which war created a sense of horror, disgust, and futility, and of all the war poets of that type Owen showed the greatest promise as prophet and seer. His thought and his execution in these poems are still for the most part immature: experiments rather than complete achievements; yet no one can read his verses without feeling that their author was one who was treading the narrow path to the fuller understanding of life. Sometimes, it is true, carried away by his repugnance to war, he became bitter, cynical, and transient in his thoughts; but generally he read the larger lesson into the compressed episode of war and slaughter —

Heart you were never hot,
Nor large, nor full like hearts made great with shot;
And though your hand be pale,
Paler are all which trail
Your cross through flame and hail;
Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not. [Extract from: “Greater Love”]

In several of the poems there is an experiment in rhyme, or rather in assonance. The end-words are not in accepted rhyme, but have a close connection with one another formed by a similarity of consonants and a slight different in vowel sounds —

Let us forgo men’s minds that are brute’s natures,
Let us not sup the blood which some say nurtures,
Be we not swift with swiftness of the tigress
Let us break ranks from those who trek from progress. [Extract from a variant of “Strange Meeting”]

On occasion the innovation has an energising influence, but too much of it palls by losing command of the ear, which, becoming muddled, misses the effects which are intended to be conveyed.
Mr Siegfried Sassoon contributes an introduction to the poems, which are tastefully arranged and published, and there is a frontispiece photograph of the author.

The volume was also favourably-reviewed  by Vita Sackville-West in The Woman’s Leader and Common Cause of the 11th February 1921, part of an overview of recently-published verse [20]:

Poems. By Wilfred Owen, with a preface by Siegfried Sassoon. (Chatto & Windus. 6s.)

The late Wilfred Owen, in his fragmentary preface to his own verses, makes upon them the following comment: “This book is not concerned with Poetry. The subject of it is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.” – and it is a comment which comes nearer the truth than the comments of most poets on their own poetry. Nevertheless, if a passionate conviction allied to a use of words both unpretentious, forcible, and bold, and to a technical originality of extreme interest, can produce poetry, then this volume is poetry. It may not be primarily concerned with the making of poetry; but it is more truly poetry than half the fanciful verse-making or far-fetched surprises that impose themselves upon the credulous in the semblance of that art. It had in it the genuine stuff of poetry, which, rarely met with, is always recognisable.
Wilfred Owen was killed in action at the age of twenty-five, seven days before the Armistice was signed in 1918, and all the poems contained in the present volume deal with the war. Of them all perhaps the most admirable is “Apologia pro poemate meo,” but it is hard to choose among excellences, and, while strongly recommending any lover of modern poetry to buy, or at least to read, not extracts, but the whole of this short volume, I would like to point out the peculiar technical interest of Owen’s method, his lavish use of the onomatopoeic trick (for example, “The stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle, Can patter out their hasty orisons”), and his highly original experiments in rhyme. One is perhaps tempted to dwell too much upon such curious pairings-off as blade and blood, shoots and shouts, sap, soap and soup – the rhyme of consonants rather than the rhyme of vowels – whereas the truer interest lies in speculation as to the system Owen would surely have evolved, had life granted him the leisure, a system of harmony or discord according to the subject of the poem, an experiment carried out by a sure and audacious hand. It must be remembered too, that he was too much of a poet to be carried away by the mere craftsmanship of the art he practiced, and one might reasonably have hoped to find a rare alliance between emotion and expression. Amongst the young poets fallen in the war, Wilfred Owen must always stand as one of the bitterest losses.
I should like to quote one short poem, entitled “Futility”:

“Move him into the sun –
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds,
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved – still warm – too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
– O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?”

Poems (1931):

A much-larger edition of Wilfred Owen’s poems was to follow in 1931 [21]. This was edited by Edmund Blunden, who also contributed a substantial memoir. The reviewer in the Yorkshire Post was evidently not that impressed by Blunden’s labours [22]:

WILFRED OWEN.
“The Poems of Wilfred Owen.” Edited with many pieces now first published, and notices of his Life and Work, by Edmund Blunden. (Chatto and Windus, 6s)
This new edition more than doubles the published work of Wilfred Owen. Thirty-five new poems have been added, with a memoir, notes, and an appendix, but some of the additions muddle rather than elucidate one’s understanding of Owen. This is partly the fault of Mr. Blunden, who has not done his work particularly well, or on a very clear plan. All the poems (three or four excepted) are quite unworthy of Owen at his best. Several are fragmentary or tentative, several decidedly immature and bombastic, and Owen himself, it can hardly be doubted, would have destroyed or at least never published the majority. Mr. Blunden scatters them among the twenty-four, till the best that Owen wrote is half-smothered in the worst.
The memoir, too, is a muddled piece of work, but valuable as an account of Owen’s short life, illustrated by excerpts from his juvenilia and his letters from the Front. The portrait of Owen (different from the fine, clear photograph in the earliest edition) is in keeping with the rest of the book. It is blurred and muddy, and was not worth reproduction. All told, this editorial handling of poetry, still so vital and young, comes perilously close to sacrilege.
G. E. G.

Owen’s manuscripts at the British Museum (1934):

With the financial assistance of the Friends of the National Libraries — whose first major donation it was — two volumes of Owen’s manuscripts entered the collections of the British Museum in 1934. They are now British Library Additional MSS. 43720, 43721.

Herbert Milne, a classicist that worked in the Museum’s Department of Manuscripts, provided an overview of the two volumes explaining their significance [23]:

THE POEMS OF WILFRED OWEN.

The fame of Wilfred Owen has been of steady growth. Many hold him to be the greatest of England’s war-time poets — great in achievement, greater still in promise — and his untimely death, almost within hail of the armistice, re-enacts for our century the bitter tragedy of Keats. It was therefore meet that the titles of his poethood should rest in the keeping of his country. With the help of the Friends of the National Libraries and separate subscribers this desirable end has now been effected, and the haphazard materials, eloquent of those unquiet times, now repose in the Department of Manuscripts within the boards of Additional MSS. 43720, 43721. The former volume was already bound when received and has been left undisturbed save for a few insertions. It includes, along with some other pieces, all the verse published in the first (Sassoon’s) edition of Owen’s poems. The second volume has been arranged in two main divisions: (1) The poems in the order of Blunden’s edition, either variant copies or final versions, in so far as these have not found place in Add. MS. 43720; (2) the remaining material, outside both Sassoon and Blunden, in rough chronological order.

We have thus in the Museum a unique series of documents for the study of a poet’s development, telescoped within a few crowded years. Keats, overtly or subtly, is the dominating influence, and to Keats Owen must have recognized a special affinity, much as Keats himself acknowledged his own kinship with Shakespeare. Moreover, as in the letters of Keats we can often trace the germ of an idea which later comes to flower in his verse, so in the many variant forms of Owen’s poems we can follow the whole course of a poetic thought from the first rough jotting as it strikes the brain through successive enrichments to its full presentation.

Finally, a word must be said about Owen’s peculiar contribution to the technics of English verse, his masterly use of assonance. This device is of course not an invention of Owen’s, but no poet has employed it to such purpose. The strange, intense effects he draws from it can best be studied in those two most personal and most moving of his poems. The Show in which he perceived with horror the vision of his own death, and Strange Meeting in which his brooding spirit, escaped at last from the outrage of war, reconciles itself in death with the ghost of the slayer — ‘Let us sleep now.’

Moving beyond the 1960s:

“The fame of Wilfred Owen has been of steady growth.” Thus Herbert Milne welcomed two volumes of Owen’s manuscripts into the British Museum in the 1930s. According to scholars like Ricketts and Reynolds, however, Owen largely remained a “poet’s poet” until the 1960s when changes elsewhere meant that his poetry (or a very small proportion of it) broke into the cultural mainstream. From that decade on, Owen and the war poets have sometimes been seen as being appropriated to a dominant view that promulgated the First World War as an exercise in futility, particularly from a British point of view.

The very strength and longevity of the futility meme — characterised to some by the ending of the final episode of the BBC comedy series Blackadder Goes Forth (1989) — has meant that the war poets have sometimes become collateral damage in ongoing debates about the war and its conduct. While Owen and his contemporaries did not necessarily aim to become the “voice of a nation,” their importance to the prevailing cultural narrative on the First World War has led some ‘revisionists’ to argue that the war poets’ experiences were somehow unrepresentative. Here is a (fairly mild) example from Gary Sheffield’s Forgotten Victory (2001) [24]:

It would be wrong to deny that poetry represents a valid expression of a particular individual’s experience, but one should no more rely solely or even primarily  on literary sources to understand the First World War than base ones entire knowledge of fifteenth-century Anglo-French relations on Shakespeare’s Henry V. Still less should one imagine  that the War Poets represent ‘typical’ British soldiers. The poems of Sassoon, Owen and the like provide, at best, a very limited and skewed view of both the war as a whole and the experience of the frontline infantryman.

Others, like Reynolds, argue that the soldier-poets were not even representative of First World War poetry more generally [25]:

Yet we now reserve the term ‘war poets’ for a few celebrated soldiers such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. The latter were, moreover, atypical soldiers as well as unrepresentative poets, being young unmarried officers, sometimes uneasy about homosexual leanings and uncertain about their own courage — who often ended up with a martyr complex. […] The fact that Owen, Sassoon and their ilk penned some of the most powerful anti-war poetry in modern literature should not blind us to their atypicality.

Arguably, portraying Owen as a poet of the 1960s could be seen as part of this wider attempt to decouple the soldier-poets from the war that was the primary object of their work.

That said, it seems unlikely that the poetry of Owen, Sassoon, Blunden, Ivor Gurney, David Jones, and others is going to slip into total obscurity in the near future. In his review of Reynolds’s book, the cultural historian Jay Winter accepted the atypicality of the poets’ experience, but wondered if there might be reasons why their view had eventually become the dominant one [26]:

[…] it is undoubtedly true that we cannot take the war poets as representative of the attitudes of contemporaries about whether the war had to be fought. The intriguing question is why over the course of the 20th century the war poets’ view, if there was one, has come to dominate later understandings of the 1914-18 conflict in Britain, and to a certain degree in France.

It is just possible to imagine a different world in which Owen could have himself became a genuine 1960s poet, albeit at the age of sixty-seven. Sadly, that did not come to pass. Rather than seeing Owen as a poet of the 1960s, perhaps it would be better to regard him both as a poet of his own time, but also as a poet for all time?

Futility, by Wilfred Owen

Move him into the sun —
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields half-sown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds —
Woke once the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
— O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?

Lieutenant Wilfred Edward Salter Owen, M.C.; 5th (T.F.) Battalion, attached 2nd Battalion, Manchester Regiment; born Plas Wilmot, near Oswestry (Shropshire), 18th March 1893; killed in action on the Sambre-Oise Canal (Nord), 4th November 1918, aged 25; buried at Ors Communal Cemetery, Nord, France (A. 3.). “A poet of repute …”
https://www.cwgc.org/find-war-dead/casualty/336417/owen,-wilfred-edward-salter/

References:

[1] Wilfred Owen 100:
http://www.shropshireremembers.org.uk/partners/wilfred-owen-100/

[2] Harry Ricketts, Wilfred Owen: The ’60s Poet, World War I Centenary: Continuations and Beginnings, University of Oxford and Jisc, 16 October 2018:
http://ww1centenary.oucs.ox.ac.uk/aftermath/owen-the-60s-poet/

[3] David Reynolds, The long shadow: the Great War and the Twentieth Century (London: Simon & Schuster, 2013), p. 342.

[4] Ibid., p. 347.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Vincent Trott, “The Poetry is in the Pity”: Wilfred Owen and the Memory of the First World War, World War I Centenary: Continuations and Beginnings, University of Oxford and Jisc, 16 October 2018:
http://ww1centenary.oucs.ox.ac.uk/teaching/the-poetry-is-in-the-pity-wilfred-owen-and-the-memory-of-the-first-world-war/

[7] Daily Herald, 31st December 1919, p. 8; via British Newspaper Archive.

[8] Coterie, Nos. 1- 3 (1919):
https://archive.org/details/coterie1to300lalluoft

[9] Modernist Journals Project:
http://modjourn.org/render.php?view=mjp_object&id=coterie.catalog

[10] Matthew Hollis, Now all roads lead to France: the last years of Edward Thomas (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), p. 13.

[11] Dominic Hibberd, “Wilfred Owen and the Georgians,” The Review of English Studies, Vol. 30, No. 117, 1st February 1979, pp. 28-40:
https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XXX.117.28

[12] Reynolds, op cit., p. 195.

[13] Des Imagistes: an anthology (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1914):
https://archive.org/details/desimagistesanan00alberich/page/n5

[14] Oscar Wellens, “The Brief and Brilliant Life of The Athenaeum Under Mr. Middleton Murry” (T.S. Eliot), Neophilologus, Vol. 85, No. 1, January 2001, pp. 137-152.

[15] Reynolds, op cit., p. 189.

[16] For example: Dominic Hibberd, Wilfred Owen: a new biography (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2002; London: Phoenix, 2003), pp. 331-356.

[17] Peter Parker, “From Blunden to Sassoon, with gratitude,” TLS, 20th February 2013:
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/from-blunden-to-sassoon-with-gratitude/

[18] Wilfred Owen, Poems by Wilfred Owen, with an introduction by Siegfried Sassoon (London: Chatto & Windus, 1920):
http://access.bl.uk/item/viewer/ark:/81055/vdc_100010960246.0x000002

[19] Aberdeen Daily Journal, 24th January 1921, p. 3; via British Newspaper Archive.

[20] The Woman’s Leader and Common Cause, 11th February 1921, p. 10; via British Newspaper Archive.

[21] Wilfred Owen, The poems of Wilfred Owen, edited with a memoir and notes by Edmund Blunden (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931), Phoenix Library edition (1933): https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.505111/page/n3

[22] The Yorkshire Post, 13th May 1931, p. 6; via British Newspaper Archive.

[23] H. J. M. Milne, The poems of Wilfred Owen,” The British Museum Quarterly, Vol. 9, no. 1, September 1934, pp. 19-20.

[24] Gary Sheffield, Forgotten victory: the First World War: myths and realities (London: Headline Book Publishing, 2001) p. 19; the comparison with Shakespeare and Henry V doesn’t really look exact!

[25] Reynolds, op. cit., p. 187.

[26] Jay Winter, review of David Reynolds, The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century, (review no. 1628), Reviews in History, July 2014; DOI: 10.14296/RiH/2014/1628:
https://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1628

Appendix: British Library website items on Wilfred Owen:

British Library, Poetry manuscripts of Wilfred Owen, British Library Treasures:
https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-poetry-manuscripts-of-wilfred-owen

Sandra M. Gilbert, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ and ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’: tracing the influence of John Keats, British Library, Discovering Literature: 20th Century, 25th July 2016:
https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/anthem-for-doomed-youth-and-dulce-et-decorum-est-tracing-the-influence-of-john-keats

British Library, Discovering Literature: ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’:
https://www.bl.uk/works/dulce-et-decorum-est

Santanu Das, ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’, a close reading, British Library, Discovering Literature: 20th Century, 25th May 2016:
https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/a-close-reading-of-dulce-et-decorum-est

Santanu Das, Wilfred Owen, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ (video), British Library, Discovering Literature: 20th Century:
https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/videos/wilfred-owen-dulce-et-decorum-est
YouTube: https://youtu.be/fp4QMI9hKdk

British Library, Discovering Literature: ‘The Next War’ by Wilfred Owen, published in The Hydra:
https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-next-war-by-wilfred-owen-published-in-the-hydra

Santanu Das, Reframing First World War poetry, British Library. World War One:
https://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/reframing-first-world-war-poetry