A revised and updated edition of Jon Stallworthy's prize-winning and classic biography of the great World War One poet, Wilfred Owen.
Of all the poets of the First World War, Wilfred Owen most fires the imagination today. This biography is more than a simple account of his life -- the childhood spent in the backstreets of Birkenhead and Shrewsbury, the appalling months in the trenches -- it is a poet's enquiry into the workings of a poet's mind.
This paperback reproduces all the widely praised illustrations of the original edition, including drawings by the poet and facsimile...

There can be no area of human experience that has generated a wider range of powerful feelings than war. Jon Stallworthy's classic and celebrated anthology spans centuries of human experience of war, from Homer's Iliad, through the First and Second World Wars, the Vietnam War, and the wars fought since. This new edition, published to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, includes a new introduction and additonal poems from David Harsent and Peter Wyton, among others. The new selection provides improved coverage of the two World Wars and the Vietnam War, and new coverage...

A 70-year-old friend told Jon Stallworthy of her flight from war-torn Poland, carrying in her bedding-roll a coverlet she'd been embroidering for her fiance and herself. The poet was struck by the story's inverse relationship with that of the "Lady of Shalott". Where Tennyson's artist in her tower, forced to choose between the world and its "shadows" in her mirror, opts for the world and is destroyed, the peasant engages with the world and is sustained, art reflecting the engagement. The story Stallworthy traces over the outline of the old illustrates what Heaney calls poetry's power of...