Reviews

Poems by Wilfred Owen

wealhtheow's review against another edition

3.0

Owen, a poet who fought and died in WWI, is best known for "Dulce Et Decorum Est." He is excellent at haunting imagery (“froth corrupted lungs”) and has a good ear (“Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,/But limped on, blood-shod…”). This is the first time I’ve read a poetry book straight through—generally I open pages randomly and read whatever I find, and digest the whole thing over the course of months or even years. This collection is an excellent historical document, but too heavy (and heavy-handed) to read for its own sake.

ljbentley27's review against another edition

3.0

I’m not a huge lover of poetry for the sake of poetry. I am more of a lyric person but I do genuinely have a soft spot for the poetry of world war one. It is a little bit of a naïve love and tends to be focused on the famous poets but that is why I invested in this collection of poems by Wilfred Owen.

Anything I say in review will sound trite so I will just say this. For an accurate representation of what World War One was like then look no further than the works of Wilfred Owen. He doesn’t glorify war or make it seem magic. His poetry is a truth among the verisimilitude of propaganda.

Poems (The World at War) by Wilfred Owen is available now.