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Wilfred Owen

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of Britain's greatest war poets, who published only 5 poems in his short life yet whose works became seen as a warning of the futility of wars.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the celebrated British poet of World War One. Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) had published only a handful of poems when he was killed a week before the end of the war, but in later decades he became seen as the essential British war poet. His works such as Anthem for Doomed Youth, Strange Meeting and Dulce et Decorum Est went on to be inseparable from the memory of the war and its futility. However, while Owen is best known for his poetry of the trenches, his letters offer a more nuanced insight into him such as his pride in being an officer in charge of others and in being a soldier who fought alongside his comrades.

With

Jane Potter
Reader in The School of Arts at Oxford Brookes University

Fran Brearton
Professor of Modern Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast

And

Guy Cuthbertson
Professor of British Literature and Culture at Liverpool Hope University

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Available now

57 minutes

Last on

Thu 27 Oct 2022 21:30

LINKS AND FURTHER READING

CONTRIBUTORS








READING LIST

Pat Barker, The Regeneration Trilogy (Penguin, 2014)

Guy Cuthbertson, Wilfred Owen (Yale University Press, 2014)

Santanu Das, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2014)

Santanu Das, Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2005)

Max Egremont, Siegfried Sassoon: A Biography (Picador, 2006)

Dominic Hibberd, Wilfred Owen: A New Biography (Phoenix, 2003)

Dominic Hibberd, Owen the Poet (Macmillan, 1986)

Tim Kendall, Modern English War Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2006)

Tim Kendall (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2007)

Wilfred Owen (ed. John Bell), Selected Letters (Oxford University Press, 1998)

Wilfred Owen (ed. Jon Stallworthy), The War Poems of Wilfred Owen (Chatto and Windus, 1994)

Jane Potter and Jon Stallworthy, Wilfred Owen: An Illustrated Life (Bodleian Library, 2014)

Harry Ricketts, Strange Meetings: The Poets of the Great War (Chatto, 2010)

Jon Stallworthy, Wilfred Owen: A Biography (Oxford University Press, 1974)


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Broadcasts

  • Thu 27 Oct 2022 09:00
  • Thu 27 Oct 2022 21:30

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