A natural and daring choice to open festival Aug 30, 2008
Clearly, this view of war owes a lot less to Remembrance Day piety than to Wilfred Owen poetry. Consequently, Passchendaele is commercial in its design and aspirations, but not so much in its substance, which is relatively smart, relatively sensitive, and relatively in line with our traditional reluctance, in Canadian film at least, to engage in gung-ho flag waving. (Globe and Mail)
Singing Rhenium Trader Lipmann Knows Why $11,100 a Kilo Prevents Lost Fuel Aug 20, 2008
He said he favors Shakespeare and other British artists, such as composer Ralph Vaughan Williams and poet Wilfred Owen. Once, before a private audience, Lipmann performed a song by the American Tom Lehrer, which replaces the lyrics of a Gilbert and Sullivan tune with all the known elements. (Bloomberg)
The Boulevard of the Allies Jun 29, 2008
The war spawned great novels that became great movies ("All Quiet on the Western Front," for example), great poems (by Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke) and great memoirs (those of Lawrence of Arabia and Winston Churchill, to start) but mostly great losses. In truth, no novel, no poem, is quite as moving, quite as devastating, as simply reading the names of the fallen, recorded on the polished white granite war memorials that stand in every village in Europe -- or on the walls of... (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, PA)
Just Asking: Daniel Radcliffe Apr 20, 2008
Mr. Radcliffe: I've always had a love for Wilfred Owen and people like Isaac Rosenberg and Edward Thomas. Mr. (Wall Street Journal)
Happy warrior, embittered pacifist Mar 18, 2008
There Sassoon met and inspired another patient and young officer-poet, Wilfred Owen (who thought Sassoon's verse made Shakespeare's look "vapid"). Sassoon seemed unaware of the full impact he made on Owen (also homosexual) commenting to a friend about Owen's unfortunate "grammar-school" accent, but there is no doubt that this fortuitous coming together of the two poets in August 1917 created something extraordinary and enduring in English verse. (Guardian Unlimited -- Books)
From the archives, the BSO premieres 'War Requiem' Mar 9, 2008
Much loved and still widely performed, Britten's intensely antiwar Requiem addresses the ultimate questions in a striking way, much copied since, by combining secular poetry (by the World War I poet Wilfred Owen) with sections of the Latin Mass for the Dead. In the early '60s, it spoke to the European condition, still recovering from war. (Boston Globe)
* [BOOK REVIEW] All's fair in love and war Mar 2, 2008
With her new novel, Life Class, Pat Barker returns to the subject of World War I - a subject that earned her immense acclaim in the 1990s with her Regeneration trilogy (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road), an artful improvisation on the lives of the poets Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves and their compatriots, which unfurled into a fierce meditation on the horrors of war and its psychological aftermath. After several intriguing but lumpy novels set in the present... (Taipei Times, Taiwan -- World)
Young lovers learn to say goodbye to all that Jan 27, 2008
Drawing on the war journals of the famous neurologist William H. R. Rivers and the poetry and biographies of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, Barker created a fictional tableau as searing in its intimacy as it was convincing. Opening in London in the spring of 1914, "Life Class," too, returns to the front, and to the primary sources of both the war and the artists who graced (or languished in) the studios and salons of London during those blue-lit years. (Boston Globe)
The Art of War Jan 27, 2008
While the novel covers some of the same ground including battleground as Barker s superb Regeneration Trilogy, with historical figures again mingling with invented ones and artists substituted for the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, Life Class is lighter fare. Concentrating more on the turmoil of love than the trauma of war, it is rendered with the quick hand of a sketch rather than the textured layering of an oil painting. (New York Times)
* [BOOK REVIEW] Melancholic nostalgia pervades life in front of Ang Lee's lens Dec 16, 2007
As the British poet Wilfred Owen wrote about his World War I subjects, the poetry is in the pity. And so it is with Lee. (Taipei Times, Taiwan -- World)
IHS: Poetry Out Loud Dec 8, 2007
I barely got into the school competition by the skin of my teeth, said Rux, who recited Dulce Et Decorum Est, written originally by Wilfred Owen, a black soldier during WW II. I wasn't gunning for it, but then I figured I might as well step it up if I'm going to do it. Competitors are given one poem to recite for the school competitions and three poems to recite for state or national competition. (Ionia Sentinel-Standard, MI)
The day my friend Rosemary offered a bed to a frozen young homeless woman Nov 13, 2007
This week Michele saw nothing all the way through - half of Wilfred Owen: A Remembrance Tale, by Jeremy Paxman, half of My Son Jack, 10 minutes of the EastEnders omnibus, and half of The Tudors - because other things kept happening: "The dog was sick, the phone rang, I had to go out, or it went on past my bedtime. Wilfred Owen was the best by far.". . (Guardian Unlimited -- Society)
The weekend's TV Nov 12, 2007
Wilfred Owen: A Remembrance Tale (BBC1, Sunday) was an engrossing account of the greatest poet of the first world war and, clearly, a personal favourite of Paxman. "His verse is angry ... arresting ... stunning." You see the appeal. (Guardian Unlimited -- Media)
Poetic shop assistant guilty of building library of terror Nov 9, 2007
The defence described her poetry as being in the tradition of Wilfred Owen. John Burton said that there was no evidence of any intent on her part to become involved in terrorism. (Times Online)
Caustic postwar art, through German eyes Nov 6, 2007
In contrast, among British troops it was not painters but poets like Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen whose voices were heard. Today in Culture. (International Herald Tribune)
Showdown of the lowdown Oct 30, 2007
Doherty's annotations on Wilfred Owen (in Crumb Beggin' Baghead) feel forced, but otherwise there are no weak songs on this album. A posse of producers and writers give Britney Spears a lot of high-quality beats and a few passable tunes on Blackout, including Gimme More, a skanky club throbber in which she pants like a phone-sex worker. (Globe and Mail -- Entertainment)
The awful truth: the pen is not so mighty after all Sep 19, 2007
Wilfred Owen had only to write Dulce et Decorum Est (It is Sweet and Right), and the world would awaken to the horror of its self-destruction. But after emerging from enchanted forests into the glare of adulthood, I find that I was grievously misled. (Sydney Morning Herald -- Opinion)
'Voices of the Great War' - Exhibit on display at Thomas Cooper Library Aug 30, 2007
Features of the "Voices of the Great War" exhibit include: Ancestral Voices -- the literary heritage of the war; Eager Voices -- Rupert Brooke, Charles Hamilton Sorley and others; Subaltern Voices -- Siegfreid Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves; Echoing Voices -- McCrae's "In Flanders Fields" and Alan Seeger's "Rendezvous"; Voices from the Ranks -- Henri Barbusse, Frederic Manning and others; Isaac Rosenberg -- from the "Joseph Cohen Collection;" Voices of Dissent -- Clifford Allen,... (Orangeburg Times and Democrat, SC)
Obituary, Arnold Rattenbury Jul 30, 2007
Many of these artefacts found their way into exhibitions Arnold mounted in the north Wales he had come to love, especially the wondrous Ardudwy: a Catalogue of Things Made by Hand on Farms, in Quarries and at Sea, where, as he says in the introduction, "the exhibition wants to see how the bodies lived that had the hands." There were exhibitions further afield, among them one on Wilfred Owen, and, at Rockingham Castle, on marine paintings and the sea. As a poet, Arnold thought naturally in... (Guardian Unlimited -- Books)
A Well Tempered Garden Jul 26, 2007
Peter followed on with Fern Hil by Dylan Thomas and a piece entitled Anthem for a Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen (who was killed just before the end of WW1), both thought provoking pieces. Although the pieces played on the third night were outside the square, it was still an entertaining evening. (ABC Regional Online)
Ali: Semi-Exit Strategy Jul 19, 2007
It doesnt dwell on particularly egregious atrocities such as the Haditha massacre but focuses on the everyday violence that has consumed so many innocent lives, bringing out what the First World War poet Wilfred Owen described as The pity of war, the pity war distilled. . (Zmag.org)
Q&A: curriculum reform Jul 12, 2007
The issue explained: Secondary school curriculum reform. Donald MacLeod looks at what 11 to 14-year-old pupils can expect to learn under the latest reforms to the secondary school curriculum. (Guardian Unlimited -- UK)
Which books capture their era? Jul 3, 2007
In the decade of the Great War, the favourite reading of the troops was often poetry, but neither Siegfried Sassoon nor Wilfred Owen nor Edward Thomas really qualifies as a zeitgeist author. In fact, it was another thriller, also inspired by the threat of invasion, that became the forces' favourite on the Western Front. (Guardian Unlimited -- Arts)
Stirring emotions Jun 10, 2007
Imagine if they heard the language of Wilfred Owen, killed in action at age 25, Nov. 4, 1918, a week before the Armistice that ended World War I, who, in his poem, "Anthem for Doomed Youth," asks: "What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?/ Only the monstrous anger of the guns./Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle ...". I often ask people, "When the teacher introduced a poem in high school, what was the first question he asked the class?" Too often reply is: "What does this poem mean?"... (Newsday -- Opinion)
The Law of Dreams Jun 9, 2007
The poetry, as Wilfred Owen said of his Great War verse, is in the pity. Behrens is an alchemist. (Sydney Morning Herald -- Entertainment)
Espada: The Republic of Poetry May 26, 2007
The poet Wilfred Owen, who died at age twenty-four in the First World War, knew better. Here he describes the effects of poison gas at the front. (Zmag.org)
Lost treasure: military cross found on Mull after 90 years May 11, 2007
" Sassoon was threatened with a court martial, but his friend and fellow poet Robert Graves convinced officials that he was suffering from shell shock. He was sent for treatment to the Craiglockhart War Hospital for Officers, in Edinburgh, now part of Napier University, where he struck up a friendship with fellow poet Wilfred Owen. Their encounter provided the subject for Pat Barker's novel Regeneration and the 1997 film of the same name. Sassoon had several homosexual relationships but later... (The Herald)
Sassoon's lost medal found on Scottish island after 90 years May 10, 2007
In 1917, Sassoon famously befriended his fellow war poet Wilfred Owen at the Craiglockhart military hospital in Edinburgh ... " Sassoon is best known for his book Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, chronicling his journey as a young man from English country life to the horrors of war. He was in France as a second-lieutenant when he won the MC in May 1916. In another exploit, he was so upset at witnessing a friend shot dead that he single-handedly charged and captured a German trench, then flopped... (Scotsman)
On the Battlefront Apr 23, 2007
"I was reading the stories about the men and women who had become mentally unhinged by the war and I saw the parallels with my own story. It took on an extra poignancy, (thinking about) what the twins suffered and what the soldiers are suffering now. It's that same feeling of a new reality that can't be lived with comfortably." Born and raised in England and now living in Titusville, like many Brits Ms. Seebohm has always had a fascination with World War I. It seemed like a whole generation of... (Hopewell Valley News, NJ)
- Ed Vulliamy joins Iron Maiden at India's first Metalfest Apr 22, 2007
Maiden's giant, hallmark mascot Eddie, who appears on all their album covers, makes his usually part-monstrous, part-comic entrance, but he is this time a phantom mutation of some shell-shocked Tommy in a Wilfred Owen poem. We'll be back,' promises Bruce, 'and I hope those of you outside will get in' - and there is a distant roar from the ticketless hordes without, through whom we weave our way by minibus during a hasty getaway. (Guardian Unlimited)
- Mary Riddell Apr 1, 2007
Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke have been replaced by Hollywood producers and media eager to chronicle hell's last horrors, especially those featuring a pretty blonde. The two main human narratives of the Iraq War centred on Jessica Lynch and Lynndie England, two young soldiers from West Virginia. (Guardian Unlimited)
Cattiness and anti-war poems Mar 22, 2007
Michael Rux, the Ionia High student who took second place at the Poetry Out Loud contest recited, among other poems Dolce Et Decorum Est' by Wilfred Owen ... Wilfred Owen knew better. (Ionia Sentinel-Standard, MI)
Review: Tender forces sound wartime lament Feb 21, 2007
FOR his War Requiem (1962), written for the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral after its destruction during World War II, Benjamin Britten spliced poems by Wilfred Owen into the Latin text to infuse the work with contradictions and self-doubt. It continually undercuts any dominant ennobling message. (Sydney Morning Herald -- Entertainment)
Contrary to opinion: it's fine by the minister Feb 19, 2007
" His priority, before the May budget, is to finalise a film-industry package aimed at increasing private investment in film and TV. The package, thought to be worth $60 million, may involve the merger of the Australian Film Commission and Film Finance Corporation Australia. Favourite things Books: He owns at least 3000, among them about 150 old or rare editions. Latest book read: the final volume of Robert Skidelsky's three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes. Movies: Billy Elliot "for the... (Sydney Morning Herald -- Entertainment)
Plea for peace echoes down the years Feb 15, 2007
Britten's Requiem, like Mozart's and Verdi's before, follows the Catholic Mass for the dead, and even echoes their stirring choruses, but Britten, who was a pacifist from boyhood and a conscientious objector during World War II, intersperses the Latin text with poems by Wilfred Owen, written in the battlefields of World War I. ... This is basically what Wilfred Owen was writing about and what Britten wanted to set. (Sydney Morning Herald -- Entertainment)
Meanwhile: In northern France, anthem for doomed youth Feb 9, 2007
It is here that one the greatest poets of World War I, Wilfred Owen, wrote his last letter to his mother ... on in Paris, but there can be few more fitting backdrops for the work of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas and their contemporaries. (International Herald Tribune -- Ed/Op)
Comic Syal joins school book list Feb 6, 2007
This includes such stalwarts of the set text as Graham Greene, Ted Hughes and Wilfred Owen - but also now includes the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. Kate Chopin, an American 19th-Century writer, also now appears in the selection of classic pre-20th-Century authors. (BBC News -- Entertainment)
Hidden delights you may have missed ... Dec 24, 2006
99, pp480), edited by Vivien Noakes, is a sensitive collection of First World War poetry by lesser-known talents than Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. The verse, from such sources as hospital newsletters and scrapbooks, brought the pain and politics of the era to life again. (Guardian Unlimited -- Books)
'A five-course meal' Dec 1, 2006
Or does it more truly reside in a love of poets - Blake and Wilfred Owen in the case of Oliver - and landscape. He also plays with differing notions of reality. (Guardian Unlimited -- UK)
Now the boats come in Nov 27, 2006
The echoey acoustic of the cathedral may not be ideal, but it is an appropriately dramatic setting, with the painted crucifix that looms over the choir achieving a symbolic synergy with the music when the tenor, the excellent James Gilchrist, sang the words of Wilfred Owen s At a Calvary Near the Ancre One ever hangs where shelled roads part in Britten s Agnus Dei. This was just the most poignant moment of a thrillingly sung performance, with the glorious baritone of Simon Keenlyside joining... (The Sunday Times)
Radio review Nov 18, 2006
Last night's edition studiously yet succinctly enriched the station's current Wilfred Owen season. In the latest of these short slots, Your Own Wilfred, Owen's biographer Dominic Hibberd delved into the poet's 673 surviving letters. (Guardian Unlimited -- Arts)
Radio pick of the day Nov 17, 2006
Radio 3, meanwhile, continues its Wilfred Owen season. Performance On 3 (7. (Guardian Unlimited -- Arts)
Mixed feelings about Nov. 11 persist Nov 13, 2006
I confess, I have mixed feelings about "In Flanders Fields." To compare it to the great poems of World War I poems by Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg, for instance is to realize how sentimental and idealized McCrae's vision is. Not for him the nauseous reality of the trenches. (Toronto Star -- National Report)
No one better captured the pity of war, says British army chief Nov 13, 2006
Wilfred Owen's poetry, which chronicles the horror of life and death on the Western Front, speaks to soldiers serving today in Iraq and Afghanistan ... In the preface to his War Poems, Wilfred Owen wrote: 'Above all, I am not concerned with Poetry. (Guardian Unlimited -- Books)
1914-18: the war of the words Nov 10, 2006
This is the other distinguishing feature of Great War writing, from Wilfred Owen to James Beatson: soldiers set out to leave a testament. Boy knew that he had seen something remarkable on Christmas Day 1914, and must bear witness by leaving a written souvenir. (TimesOnline)
Warlord in court over use of child soldiers in Congo Nov 10, 2006
from The Independent & The Independent on Sunday. By Alex Duval Smith in The Hague. (Independent)
Caravaggio 'imitation' found to be the real thing Nov 10, 2006
from The Independent & The Independent on Sunday. Caravaggio 'imitation' found to be the real thing. (Independent)
Scientists find the perfect comedy face: Ricky Gervais Nov 10, 2006
from The Independent & The Independent on Sunday. Published: 10 November 2006. (Independent)
- James Fenton on love poetry Nov 4, 2006
Here is Wilfred Owen, writing in the last year of his life. I am the ghost of Shadwell Stair. (Guardian Unlimited)
Francis Berry dies, aged 91 Oct 31, 2006
The Iron Christ (1938), which celebrates the melting of cannon to erect the Christ of the Andes in 1902, and Murdock (1947) draw, as Philip Hobsbaum suggested, on the energy of the war poets and the cadence of Wilfred Owen. Morant Bay (1961) which deals with the ruthless suppression by Governor Eyre of a Jamaican uprising in 1865, anticipates performance poetry. (Guardian Unlimited -- Books)
Working Poets Oct 23, 2006
When I was in the eleventh grade and the war was still going, a teacher read us some poems by Wilfred Owen. And after class, for some reason, she called me up to her desk and said, Would you like to borrow this book. (New Yorker)
* Brothers by blood made enemies by language Oct 8, 2006
Bad things are Lloyd George (good at war, bad at peace), Wilfred Owen, the French, the Irish (in the First World War, with justification), Keynes, Heath, Wilson, Carter, Clinton, the UN, the EU, Hollywood, Gandhi, Princess Diana and Mountbatten. This is a dreadful pity because, when Roberts seriously thinks through the dilemmas facing the last generation of British imperialists as they came to terms with their need for American support and the inevitable ceding of power that entailed, his... (Taipei Times, Taiwan -- World Business)
Five Years Later Sep 10, 2006
Benjamin Britten placed a historical frame on his own Cold War-era pacifism by using the World War I poetry of Wilfred Owen as the text for his great "War Requiem" of 1962. The droll Broadway musical "1776" opened 193 years after the events of the American Revolution it portrays. (San Francisco Chronicle -- Entertainment)
Bearing witnessHow the Somme inspired Tolkien's Lord of the Rings Jul 4, 2006
The poet Wilfred Owen was killed in the final week of World War I at the age of 25 ... But in the main, Tolkien's imagination swerves away from Wilfred Owen's despair, mining the depths of his own sense of waste and loss, to salvage from it emotional, spiritual and moral meaning. (BBC News -- UK)
Twenty thousand reasons to remember Jul 2, 2006
The poets came first: Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Isaac Rosenberg. Poetry was followed novels such as Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, plays such as RC Sherriff's Journey's End and Robert Graves's celebrated memoir, Goodbye to All That. (Guardian Unlimited)
Honor and carnage Jul 1, 2006
A new group of poets - Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and above all Wilfred Owen - wrote in a quite new vein, about "the Pity of War," as Owen called it: "What passing bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns." He himself was killed in the last week of the war, but those other three survived and all wrote grimly realistic memoirs of the war. By the 1930s that may have encouraged a turn toward pacifism. (International Herald Tribune -- Ed/Op)
War, love and poetry May 6, 2006
One week before the Armistice in 1918, a young Welsh lieutenant named Wilfred Owen was killed while leading his platoon across a French canal ... Such altruism touches on what Wilfred Owen stressed in a poem called "Greater Love," a phrase drawn from "Greater love than this hath no man than to lay down his life for his friend.". (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, PA)
SG/SM/10430-DC/3021 Apr 26, 2006
More than 90 years have passed since modern-day chemical weapons were first used, during the 1915 Battle of Ypres in World War I. The British war poet Wilfred Owen described the horror of seeing a fellow soldier guttering, choking, drowning, as if under a green sea of chlorine gas. Since then, chemical weapons have continued to be developed and deployed against both soldiers and civilians, with the arsenal reaching its zenith during the Cold War. (United Nations Press Releases)
Suite Française Apr 25, 2006
She is not unlike World War I poets like Wilfred Owen and Charles Sorley, who also didn't survive the war they chronicled. In her notes, N. (Christian Science Monitor)
