Poems(诗集).pdf

Poems by Wilfred Owen
Poems
Wilfred Owen
1
Poems by Wilfred Owen
Introduction
In writing an Introduction such as this it is good to be brief. The poems
printed in this book need no mendations from me or
anyone else. The author has left us his own fragmentary but impressive
Foreword; this, and his Poems, can speak for him, backed by the authority
of his experience as an infantry soldier, and sustained by nobility and
originality of style. All that was strongest in Wilfred Owen survives in his
poems; any superficial impressions of his personality, any records of his
conversation, behaviour, or appearance, would be irrelevant and unseemly.
The curiosity which demands such morsels would be incapable of
appreciating the richness of his work.
The discussion of his experiments in assonance and dissonance (of
which `Strange Meeting' is the finest example) may be left to the
professional critics of verse, the majority of whom will be more
upied with such technical details than with the profound humanity
of the self-revelation manifested in such magnificent lines as those at the
end of his `Apologia pro Poemate Meo', and in that other poem which he
named `Greater Love'.
The importance of his contribution to the literature of the War cannot
be decided by those who, like myself, both admired him as a poet and
valued him as a friend. His conclusions about War are so entirely in
accordance with my own that I cannot attempt to judge his work with any
critical detachment. I can only affirm that he was a man of absolute
integrity of mind. He never wrote his poems (as so many war-poets did) to
make the effect of a personal gesture. He pitied others; he did not pity
himself. In the last year of his life he attained a clear vision of what he
needed to say, and these poems survive him as his true and splendid
testament.
Wilfred Owen was born at Oswestry on 18th March 1893. He was
educated at the Birkenhead Institute, and matriculated at London