Stallworthy - Wilfred Owen

CONTENTS

Of all the poets of the First World War, Wilfred Owen most fires the imagination today. This biography is more than a simple account of his life the childhood spent in the backstreets of Birkenhead and Shrewsbury, the appalling months in the trenches it is a poets enquiry into the workings of a poets mind.

This revised paperback reproduces all the widely praised illustrations of the original edition, including drawings by the poet and facsimile manuscripts of many of his greatest poems. In its use of verse manuscripts to reveal the working of the creative imagination, it inaugurated a new form of literary biography and is a classic of the genre.

Hailed by Graham Greene as surely one of the finest biographies of our time, Wilfred Owen 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. This edition includes a new afterword by the author, looking back at both the biography itself and new scholarship around Owens work and life.

Jon Stallworthy, born in 1935, was educated at Rugby, in the Royal West African Frontier Force, and at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry. At one time, poetry editor of Oxford University Press, he is now Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of Wolfson College, of the British Academy, and of the Royal Society of Literature. He has published eight books of poetry (all but the most recent represented in his Rounding the Horn: Collected Poems), as well as translations from the Russian of poems by Alexander Blok and Boris Pasternak, and a prize-winning biography of Louis MacNeice. His biography of Wilfred Owen won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the W. H. Smith Literary Award, and the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Chapter 1. Oswestry

Chapter 2. Birkenhead

Chapter 3. Shrewsbury

Chapter 4. Dunsden and After

Chapter 5. France 191315

Chapter 6. Training

Chapter 7. The Somme

Chapter 8. Craiglockhart

Chapter 9. Scarborough and Ripon

Chapter 10. France 1918

To the memory of Harold Owen

This book is dedicated to the memory of the man it was Wilfred Owens good fortune to have as a brother, and mine to have as a friend. Harold Owens Journey from Obscurity and the fine edition of the poets Collected Letters, on which he collaborated with John Bell, provide the biographer of Wilfred Owen with his principal asset and his principal problem. How to fit the old cloth into the new garment? Too many fragments of direct quotation, with their varying tones and obtrusive stitching of quotation marks, could only make an uneven patchwork. I have preferred, with Harold Owens approval, to base sections of my narrative particularly some early sections on indirect quotation, interspersing these with an occasional piece of some length from the Journey or the Collected Letters. My sources are detailed in the Notes, which have been placed at the end of the book where they will be available to the scholar and offer no distraction to the general reader.

Although this biography draws heavily on those others, and although it contains a good deal that they do not, it is in no sense a substitute for them. I see it, rather, as complementary; a portrait of the man as artist to balance Harold Owens portrait of the artist as elder brother, and Wilfreds own careful self-portrait in his letters (four-fifths of them to his mother) of the artist as son. I see the Collected Letters, Journey from Obscurity, and this biography as together forming the foundation for an edition of the Complete Poems of Wilfred Owen.

Biographies as a rule embody the perceptions and researches of many people other than their authors, and this is no exception to that rule. Unlike many of its kind, however, it could never have been written at all but for two acts of generosity. My greatest debt of gratitude is to Harold Owen, and my greatest regret that he did not live to see the book completed. Had he done so, it would have been a better one, but there would have been no book at all had he not entrusted his brothers books and papers to me, and himself given me so many hours of his time when we both knew that his hours were numbered.

We have no testimony but Harold Owens to much of his brothers childhood and to many incidents in his later life, and the evidence of the single witness will always be questioned. I believe him to have been an unusually faithful witness, even when writing of events that took place decades before, but it must be remembered that his view of his brother was necessarily the ugly ducklings of the swan.

Despite Harold Owens generosity, this book could not have been undertaken or at least undertaken on this scale but for the generosity of the Warden and Fellows of All Souls College, Oxford. A year spent as a Visiting Fellow under their most hospitable roof enabled me to assemble my material and my thoughts and write for some months undistracted by anything more intrusive than a blackbird on my window sill and a fountain beneath it. One of Wilfred Owens greatest regrets was that he never got to Oxford, and I like to think that he would have shared my satisfaction that his Life should owe so much to an Oxford College dedicated to the memory of King Henry V and those who perished in the French Wars.

I am happy to be able to record my gratitude also to Mr. George Derbyshire for sharing so generously his unrivalled knowledge of the history of the Manchester Regiment; to Miss Dorothy Gunston and Mr. Leslie Gunston for their vital recollections of their cousin; and to Mr. Dominic Hibberd for assistance in dating and deciphering the manuscripts. I am grateful, too, to many others who helped me in my researches: Mr. J. E. Allison, the Rev. J. Biddlestone, Professor Louis Bonnerot, Miss Blanche Bulman, Mrs. Elizabeth Cameron, the Librarian and staff of the Codrington Library, Miss Marie Dauthieu, Mrs. Edith Dymott, Dame Helen Gardner, Mr. Eric Garton, Mr. John Harris, Sir Rupert and Lady Hart-Davis, Mrs. M. Hirth of the Library of the University of Texas at Austin, Mr. K. D. Holt, Mr. and Mrs. Ikin, Miss Dorothy Iles, Professor Gwyn Jones, Sir Geoffrey Keynes, Miss Dorothy Kitchingman, Mr. Evan Lane, Mr. Murray McClymont, Mr. A. K. Newboult, Miss M. Newboult, Mr. Foy Nissen, Mr. D. Norman, Mr. Alec Paton, Miss M. and Miss K. Paton, Mrs. Arthur Philips, Mr. C. H. Wallace Pugh, Miss Mary Ragge, the Registrar of the University of Reading, Mrs. Ian Reid, Mr. J. H. Rowsell, Mr. Jeffrey Sains, Mr. William St. Clair, Mr. Eric Smallpage, Mrs. Angus Stewart, Dr. P. H. Tooley, Mr. H. Walpole of the Oswestry Public Library, Mr. David Yates, Miss Elizabeth Varet, and Sister Valerio.

I am also indebted to the following: Mrs. C. T. A. Beevor, for permission to reprint Jessie Popes poem, The Call; Sir Rupert Hart-Davis, for permission to print Siegfried Sassoons unpublished poem, Vision, and prose; Mr. G. T. Sassoon, for permission to reprint They from Siegfried Sassoons