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  • Published: 7 November 2013
  • ISBN: 9781448191949
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 224
Categories:

The Complete Poems and Fragments: Volume I



A handsomely packaged and updated reissue of Wilfred Owen’s Complete Poems and Fragments, first published in 1983.

Jon Stallworthy’s Wilfred Owen, called by Graham Greene ‘surely one of the finest biographies of our time’, won the Duff Cooper Prize, the W.H. Smith Literary Award, and the E.M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In its use of verse manuscripts to reveal the working of the creative imagination, it inaugurated a new form of literary biography.

By matching the paper, pencil, ink and twenty-four watermarks of the largely undated manuscripts with those of the poet’s dated letters, Professor Stallworthy has been able to disentangle the complex chronology of Owen’s work and reveal for the first time the overall development of the poet and successive stages in the development of individual poems and fragments.

The edition is divided into two volumes to enable readers to have text, notes and manuscript material before them at the same time. Volume I contains an Introduction, a Biographical Table, and the text of 110 poems (many with important new readings), and supporting factual and critical notes. Volume II provides the basis for the text of the poems, reproducing many of the manuscripts and the fragments, annotated like the poems. The manuscripts and fragments are reproduced in typeset transcription, showing Owen’s alterations, cancellations and reworkings.

Together these volumes present more than twice the number of poems and fragments hitherto available, and comprise the most comprehensive and detailed edition of Wilfred Owen's work. It is a worthy monument to a man who lived to see only five of his poems in print, but whose work is now known throughout the English-speaking world, and indeed beyond it as the text of Benjamin Britten’s great War Requiem.

  • Published: 7 November 2013
  • ISBN: 9781448191949
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 224
Categories:

About the author

Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen MC was one of the leading English poets of the First World War. He volunteered on 21st October 1915. He saw a good deal of front-line action: he was blown up, concussed and suffered shell-shock. At Craiglockhart, the psychiatric hospital in Edinburgh, he met Siegfried Sassoon who inspired him to develop his war poetry.

He was sent back to the trenches in September, 1918 and in October won the Military Cross by seizing a German machine-gun and using it to kill a number of Germans.

On 4th November he was shot and killed near the village of Ors. The news of his death reached his parent’s home as the Armistice bells were ringing on 11 November 1918.

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