SOURCE: "Wilfred Owen and Poetic Truth," in University of Kansas City Review, Vol. XXV, No. 2, Winter 1958, pp. 110-16.

In the following excerpt, Spear explores Owen's concept of poetic truth, which she believes was arrived at through disillusion with his own earlier poetry.

Although many writers have glanced at Wilfred Owen's ideas of poetic truth, no one has fully defined and documented them; no one has followed him through the profound mental and spiritual struggles in which he was led to reject the kind of poetry which he had once most admired; no one has succeeded in fully correlating his final concept of truth, arrived at through agony and disillusion, with the concept found in his earlier poems….

Owen's early poetry appears to be far removed in spirit from his later work. As a young man he was a natural romantic. His poetic idol was Keats and his first...