’It seemed that out of the battle I escaped
  Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
  Through granites which Titanic wars had groined. 
  Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
  Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred. 
  Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
  With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
  Lifting distressful hands as if to bless. 
  And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall. 
  With a thousand fears that vision’s face was grained;
  Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
  And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan. 
  “Strange, friend,” I said, “Here is no cause to mourn.” 
  “None,” said the other, “save the undone years,
  The hopelessness.  Whatever hope is yours,
  Was my life also..."’

The poem which begins with these lines is, we believe, the finest in these two books, both in intention and achievement.  Yet no one can mistake its source.  It comes, almost bodily, from the revised Induction to ‘Hyperion.’  The sombre imagination, the sombre rhythm is that of the dying Keats; the creative impulse is that of Keats.

  ’None can usurp this height, return’d that shade,
  But those to whom the miseries of the world
  Are misery, and will not let them rest.’

That is true, word by word, and line by line, of Wilfred Owen’s ’Strange Meeting.’  It touches great poetry by more than the fringe; even in its technique there is the hand of the master to be.  Those monosyllabic assonances are the discovery of genius.  We are persuaded that this poem by a boy like his great forerunner, who had the certainty of death in his heart, is the most magnificent expression of the emotional significance of the war that has yet been achieved by English poetry.  By including it in his book, the editor of Wheels has done a great service to English letters.

Extravagant words, it may be thought.  We appeal to the documents.  Read Georgian Poetry and read ‘Strange Meeting.’  Compare Wilfred Owen’s poem with the very finest things in the Georgian book—­Mr Davies’s ‘Lovely Dames,’ or Mr de la Mare’s ‘The Tryst,’ or ‘Fare Well,’ or the twenty opening lines of Mr Abercrombie’s disappointing poem.  You will not find those beautiful poems less beautiful than they are; but you will find in ‘Strange Meeting’ an awe, an immensity, an adequacy to that which has been most profound in the experience of a generation.  You will, finally, have the standard that has been lost, and the losing of which makes the confusion of a book like Georgian Poetry possible, restored to you.  You will remember three forgotten things—­that poetry is rooted in emotion, and that it grows by the mastery of emotion, and that its significance finally depends upon the quality and comprehensiveness of the emotion.  You will recognise that the tricks of the trade have never been and never will be discovered by which ability can conjure emptiness into meaning.