Poems

Wilfred Owen wrote almost all of these poems in the last year and a half of his life, as an officer on the Western Front and in hospital: 'Dulce et Decorum Est', with its soldier dying in a gas attack and its bitter rejection of 'the old Lie' that it is sweet to die for one's country; 'Anthem for Doomed Youth'; 'Strange Meeting', in which a dead soldier meets the enemy he killed; and others. 'My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.'

Owen (1893–1918) was killed in action a week before the Armistice, at twenty-five, when only five of his poems had been published. This first collection, of 1920, was edited by his friend Siegfried Sassoon, who wrote the introduction. Compare All Quiet on the Western Front.