SOURCE: Introduction to The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, edited by C. Day Lewis, Chatto & Windus, 1964, pp. 11-29.

In the following excerpt, Day Lewis admires the poetic maturity evident in Owen's war poems.

Wilfred Owen must remain, in one respect at least, an enigma. His war poems, a body of work composed between January 1917, when he was first sent to the Western Front, and November 1918, when he was killed, seem to me certainly the finest written by any English poet of the First War and probably the greatest poems about war in our literature. His fame was posthumous—he had only four poems published in his lifetime. The bulk of his best work was written or finished during a period of intense creative activity, from August 1917 (in one week of October he wrote six poems) to September 1918—a period comparable with the annus mirabilis of his admired Keats...