FRAGMENTS OF PEACE & WAR BOOK I A MONOGRAPH ON THE POETRY OF WILFRED OWEN AND SOME ASPECTS OF HIS LIFE: Instinct’s & Intuition’s Questions posed, Evolved and Justified

Previously published only as an e-book, this book, now revised and re-proofed, is the first in a series of five books which comprise a Monograph which explores the Poetry of Wilfred Owen in all its aspects. He was killed in battle on the 4th November 1918, seemingly leaving his manuscripts in a very disordered state. More than 100 years after his death, the subject of this Monograph is no longer ‘about war’. Instead, its ‘moving spirit’ is that it is ‘about history’ and all that flows from it, particularly Poetry. And so, as ’history’ is the ‘reconstructor’ of the past, this Monograph reconstructs, from fragments, Poems and, with these reconstructions, places them in a broader historical and artistic context. This Book I charts the visionary advent of this process of reconstruction. It demonstrates the forensic reproduction of about 80 ‘new’ Poems from disparate and, in some cases, complex manuscript fragments; with particular emphasis on how that great Poem, ‘Strange Meeting’, was ‘finished’, though now lost in its much longer finished version; notably with a life-affirming conclusion. The Monologue, as a whole, is ‘about’ the reconstructive and restorative process in connection with such works of art. This may be controversial – and for good reason – but the ‘mind-set’ of this series of books is that it is so much better to have something rather than ‘the nothing’ of otherwise permanent loss. And, indeed, Wilfred Owen, himself, composed, in totality, the missing conclusions of some fragmentary Poems left unfinished by one no less than his hero, John Keats.