Reviews for Poetry of the First World War

The average rating for Poetry of the First World War based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-01-21 00:00:00 Shawn Wendt Dominic Hibberd, who also wrote Wilfred Owen: A New Biography, focuses on Owen's work in this comprehensive and revealing study of his development as a writer. While many scholars have focused exclusively on Owen's war poetry, Hibberd devotes considerable attention to his pre-war work, unearthing new facts and intriguing connections which allow a fuller understanding of major themes that run throughout Owen's writing, particularly his difficult relationship with Christianity and his interest in issues related to the body (touch, pain, pleasure, illness, injury). Hibberd also examines Owen's response to his major literary influences: Keats, Shelley, Swinburne, the French decadent poets (one of whom, Laurent Tailhade, he befriended while living in France before the war), and of course his fellow war poets Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon. A notable feature of the book is the intelligent and sensitive discussion of the impact Owen's homosexuality had on his work, which traces the confusion, guilt and despair that runs through Owen's early poems to his struggle with his sexuality and analyzes how his sexual desires shaped his attitude to the war. Some of the material in this book is included in Hibberd's biography, mostly from the war poetry chapters. Owen the Poet is a well-written companion piece to the biography, well worth reading for those really interested in Owen.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-07-28 00:00:00 Pat Kramersmeier lovely mix of analysis and biography