SOURCE: "Wilfred Owen's Greatest Love," in Tulane Studies in English, Vol. VI, 1956, pp. 105-17.

In the following excerpt, Cohen explores the spiritual source of Owen's poetry.

Here in thirty-three brief pages is the evidence that Wilfred Owen was the greatest poet of the war. There have been war-poets, but he was a poet of another kind." Thus wrote John Middleton Murry in reviewing the 1920 edition of Wilfred Owen's Poems. Between Murry's pronouncement and a statement by Dylan Thomas in 1954 that Owen was "the greatest of the poets who wrote in and of the Great War, and one of the greatest poets of this century," many similar laudatory comments have appeared in print. But the commentators, however lavish in their praise, have been sparing in their criticism. Surprisingly few really perceptive studies of Owen's poetry exist, although appreciative remarks appear frequently.

Those who have sought to explain critically the...