Wilfred Owen

Starred review from March 15, 2014
Wilfred Owen, who, at 25, was killed a week before the armistice, is the greatest English-language poet of WWI who died fighting it. Granting that there are more thorough biographies of Owen, Cuthbertson says he wishes to highlight Owen's life and character by focusing on the relationships of the child and the man, the man and the poetry, and the child and the western front. These he pursues through constant quotation of and commentary on Owen's letters, other prose, and poetry. He brings Owen's early blooming literariness forward by connecting Owen's reading to his poetry and by discussing his encounters, fraught with class tension, with important literary contemporaries. Cuthbertson highlights Owen's lingering childlikeness, manifested by the innocentindeed, innocuouscharm adults ascribed to him as well as his preference for the company of children, and he contrasts that with the heroism and fellowship Owen displayed as a junior officer at the front. He accounts for why Owen could be initially dubious about the war yet join in it, be against it yet determined to fight and suffer with the troops under him. Most important for some, Cuthbertson argues that if, as gay advocates claim, Owen was homosexual, he wasn't what we now call a homosexual, whether open or closeted. Invaluable insight into a man whose words will be heard often during the upcoming WWI centennial.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)