Poems (1920) is the posthumous collection of Wilfred Owen's poetry, edited by Siegfried Sassoon. It includes Anthem for Doomed Youth, Dulce et Decorum Est, Strange Meeting and Futility, poems that changed the way the First World War is remembered.
The poems
Almost all of Owen's war poems were written in about fifteen months, from August 1917 to his death in November 1918. They describe gas attacks, shell shock, the burial of the dead and the waste of young lives, in rich, musical language.
Owen often used half-rhyme, rhyming consonants but not vowels, an innovation that influenced later poets.
Craiglockhart
Owen wrote Anthem for Doomed Youth and Dulce et Decorum Est in 1917 at Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh, with the encouragement of Siegfried Sassoon, who corrected some of his drafts.
Dulce et Decorum Est answered the patriotic verse of writers such as Jessie Pope, to whom one draft was ironically dedicated.
Publication
Only five of his poems were published in his lifetime. After his death Edith Sitwell and Sassoon gathered his manuscripts, and Sassoon edited the volume of 1920, with a short introduction.
A fuller edition by Edmund Blunden appeared in 1931. Benjamin Britten set nine of the poems in his War Requiem of 1962.
Anecdotes
A Latin title
Dulce et Decorum Est takes its title from a line by the Roman poet Horace saying that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country, which Owen calls 'the old Lie'.
Britten's Requiem
Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, written for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral in 1962, interweaves the Latin Mass for the dead with nine poems by Owen.
Frequently asked questions
Who published Wilfred Owen's poems?
Siegfried Sassoon, with the help of Edith Sitwell, in 1920; Edmund Blunden published a larger edition in 1931.
What is Dulce et Decorum Est about?
A gas attack on soldiers returning from the front line, and the death of one man who could not put on his mask in time.
What is half-rhyme?
A rhyme in which the consonants match but the vowels differ, as in 'hall' and 'hell', a technique Owen used often.