Rupert Brooke, Charles Sorley, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen

Rupert Brooke, Charles Sorley, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen
Author: Lorna Hardwick
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2024-03-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198907125

Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, and Charles Sorley all died in the First Word War. They came from diverse social, educational, and cultural backgrounds, but for all of the writers, engagement with Greek and Roman antiquity was decisive in shaping their war poetry. The world views and cultural hinterlands of Brooke and Sorley were framed by the Greek and Latin texts they had studied at school, whereas for Owen, who struggled with Latin, classical texts were a part of his aspirational literary imagination. Rosenberg's education was limited but he encountered some Greek and Roman literature through translations, and through mediations in English literature. The various ways in which the poets engaged with classical literature are analysed in the commentaries, which are designed to be accessible to classicists and to users from other subject areas. The extensive range of connections made by the poets and by subsequent readers is explained in the Introduction to the volume. The commentaries illuminate relationships between the poems and attitudes to the war at the time, in the immediate post-war years, and subsequently. They also probe how individual poems reveal various facets of the poetry of unease, the poetry of survival, and the poetics of war and ecology. References to the accompanying online Oxford Classical Receptions Commentaries will enable readers to follow up their special interests. This volume differs from the shorter volume Greek and Roman Antiquity in First World War Poetry: Making Connections in that it covers the whole output of the four poets, and not just their war poems.

Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen
Author: Jon Stallworthy
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2013-11-14
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1448180783

Of all the poets of the First World War, Wilfred Owen most fires the imagination today – this is the comprehensive literary biography of the greatest WW1 poet Wilfred Owen tragically died in battle just a few days before the Armistice. Now, during the centenary year of his death, this biography honours Owen’s brief yet remarkable life, and the enduring legacy he left. Stallworthy covers his life from the childhood spent in the backstreets of Shrewsbury to the appalling final months in the trenches. More than a simple account of his life, it is also a poet's enquiry into the workings of a poet's mind. This revised edition contains the beautiful illustrations of the original edition, including the drawings by Owen and facsimile manuscripts of his greatest poems, as well as a new preface by the author. ‘One of the finest biographies of our time.’ Graham Greene ‘An outstanding book, a worthy memorial to its subject.’ Kingsley Amis ‘As lovingly detailed as the records of Owen's short life permit, but it is always fascinatingly readable, in fact engrossing.’ Sunday Telegraph