FRAGMENTS OF PEACE AND WAR BOOK IV A MONOGRAPH ON THE POETRY OF WILFRED OWEN AND SOME ASPECTS OF HIS LIFE: WILFRED OWEN AND OTHER 1ST WORLD WAR POETS

Previously published as an e-book, this is the 4th volume in the series of books - Fragments of Peace & War – ‘A Monograph on the Poetry of Wilfred Owen and Some Aspects of his Life’. It seeks to contextualize his Poetry within the tremendous circumstances of the time, with emphasis on how those circumstances impacted on the cultural outlook of the general population; and as such was to be diversely expressed in Poetry. Accordingly, this book includes Poetry of other Poets published at the time – particularly that of some ‘ordinary’ ‘Soldier Poets’, published in September 1916 – that is, just after the first two months of Battle of the Somme, which began on 1st July 1916, giving rise to catastrophic losses in killed and wounded. It also includes the quite exceptional Poetry of Ian Mackenzie, as published in a small volume, in 1919; as well as equally exceptional Poetry by Isaac Rosenberg, Geoffrey Bache-Smith, Rupert Brooke and Charles Sorley, all which was published during, and immediately after, the War – all published or in preparation by the time of the first formal Cenotaph ceremony which took place in Whitehall, London, on a Monday, at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1919, when the whole Nation succumbed to a profound silence … ‘So smote was the forehead of the earth, that She lay in a daze as though dead’. This is the context of the unprecedented demand at that time for ‘war-associated’ Poetry - in which was sought, instinctively, a mass catharsis for the relief of profound mass grieving and traumatization. Thus it is that, here, Wilfred Owen’s Poetry is ‘era-anthologized’ within that time’s corpus of First World War ‘War Poetry’.