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SOURCE: "The Poems of Wilfred Owen," in The Criterion, Vol. X, No. 41, July 1931, pp. 658–69.
In the following excerpt, Parsons praises Owen's fine sensibility and rich imagination as a realist poet.
Only two poets, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, attempted in any wholehearted sense the realist method … and endeavoured to interpret their reactions to War primarily in terms of objective experience. Of the former Owen's is unquestionably the more compelling voice, not only because the twenty-four poems which comprised, till the recent appearance of [Edmund] Blunden's enlarged edition, his one published book of verse, constitute a complete and altogether unique corpus of war poetry, but because in the main his sensibility is finer and his imagination richer than Sassoon's. Sassoon, moreover, is primarily a lyric poet and a satirist: his realism is only an indirect implication of his satire. Expressing essentially the same attitude as Owen, he writes with...
This section contains 3,329 words (approx. 12 pages at 300 words per page) |
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