English Faculty Library, Wilfred Owen Box 2, fol. 507r
Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford Order image
English Faculty Library, Wilfred Owen photograph 1, F L
Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford Order image
Wilfred Owen, 'Anthem for Dead Youth'
Comments
What makes this a treasure?
Lest we forget.
Posted by Dirk Hennebel
On 22/04/2012
It is part of every Englishman's heritage and has become our birthright. What a man; what a poet ...
Posted by Tony Bond
On 18/12/2011
Another wonderful treasure. My favourite poem from one of my favourite poets. Why I am a pacifist.
Posted by Virginia Moffatt
On 01/11/2011
This manuscript, the second of nine, of a poem central to the national memory and mythology of the Great War, must be counted both a Bodleian and a National Treasure for two reasons. There is, first, its place in the documentary record of one of the most celebrated meetings in the long history of English literature: that of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. In the summer of 1917, they met as patients at Craiglockhart War Hospital, outside Edinburgh, and the young poet showed the already-famous older one the ‘First Draught’ [sic] of his ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’. It then "dawned on [Sassoon] that my little friend was much more than the promising minor poet I had hitherto adjudged him to be. I now realized that his verse, with its sumptuous epithets and large-scale imagery, its noble naturalness and depth of meaning, had impressive affinities with Keats, whom he took as his supreme exemplar. This new sonnet was a revelation. I suggested one or two slight alterations …" Some of those suggestions, in Sassoon’s hand, appear on that ‘First Draught’.The poem’s second claim to ‘Treasure’ status is its subsequent inscription on the national memory of an indictment Owen was the first poet to articulate: that those who die as cattle in a slaughterhouse die in such numbers that there is no time to give them the trappings of a Christian funeral. Instead, they receive a brutal parody of such a service: ‘the stuttering rifles’ praying (presumably) that they will kill them; the ‘choirs … of shells’ wailing as they hunt them down. The bugles may sound the Last Post for them, but they had previously called them to the colours in those same sad shires. So, bitterly but obliquely, Owen assigns to Church and State responsibility for their deaths. The ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ became part of an International Treasure when the composer, Benjamin Britten, set it to music in his ‘War Requiem’ (of which Decca sold 200,000 copies of a two-disc set in 1963).
Posted by Prof. Jon Stallworthy
On 05/09/2011