The making of a poet: Wilfred Owen’s ‘autobiography’ in letters

Selected Letters of Wilfred Owen Jane Potter

OUP, pp.464, 25

Here is the opening of a sonnet written by Wilfred Owen in the spring of 1911: ‘Three colours have I known the Deep to wear;/ ’Tis well today that Purple grandeurs gloom.’ Owen was 18 and had just been on a pilgrimage to Teignmouth in Devon, where his hero John Keats had once stayed.

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TaggedCensorship, Craiglockhart hospital, Family, gas attacks, Letters, Poetry, Siegfried Sssoon, the first world war, the Somme, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’

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The making of a poet: Wilfred Owen’s ‘autobiography’ in letters

How, between 1911 and 1917, Owen became the dazzling poet we know and love is the story told in Jane Potter’s new edition of his selected letters

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