Introduction
In writing an Introduction such as this it is good to be brief. The poems
printed in this book need no preliminary commendations from me or
anyone else. The author has left us his own fragmentary but impressive
Foreword; this, and his Poems, can speak for him, backed by the authority
of his experience as an infantry soldier, and sustained by nobility and
originality of style. All that was strongest in Wilfred Owen survives in his
poems; any superficial impressions of his personality, any records of his
conversation, behaviour, or appearance, would be irrelevant and unseemly.
The curiosity which demands such morsels would be incapable of
appreciating the richness of his work.
The discussion of his experiments in assonance and dissonance (of
which `Strange Meeting\' is the finest example) may be left to the
professional critics of verse, the majority of whom will be more
preoccupied with such technical details than with the profound humanity
of the self-revelation manifested in such magnificent lines as those at the
end of his `Apologia pro Poemate Meo\', and in that other poem which he
named `Greater Love\'.