Wilfred Owen's Voices: Language and Community

Abstract

In this perceptive and original study of one of the most popular of English poets, Douglas Kerr has written the life of Wilfred Owen's language. The book explores the meaning in Owen's life of the family, the Church, the army, and English poets of the past. It examines the language of these four communities, and shows how their discourses helped to mould the poet's own. The language in which Owen's extraordinary poems and letters are written was learned in and from these communities which shaped his short career. But there were times too when he hated each of them. As Douglas Kerr shows, much of the power of Owen's writing derives from his desire to transform the communities which formed him. Accessible and lucid, and informed by the insights of recent theory, Wilfred Owen's Voices throws important new light on the best-known of the English war poets, and on both the cultural history and intense personal drama to be read in his work.