Melvin Bragg talks to Lauren Laverne about Desert Island Discs and his poem 'Strange Meeting' He says the poems have a somber feel when you're reading it. The rhymes that don't quite work in poetry are often some of the best aren't they? Says Dame Margot Fontaine what he's always looked forward to most would be an old age on a desert island just saying gramophone records all day long, Bing Crosby could you build a house no way I couldn't fix a safety pen.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the celebrated British poet of World War One. Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) had published only a handful of poems when he was killed a week before the end of the war, but in later decades he became seen as the essential British war poet. His works such as Anthem for Doomed Youth, Strange Meeting and Dulce et Decorum Est went on to be inseparable from the memory of the war and its futility. However, while Owen is best known for his poetry of the trenches, his letters offer a more nuanced insight into him such as his pride in being an officer in charge of others and in being a soldier who fought alongside his comrades.
With
Jane Potter
Reader in The School of Arts at Oxford Brookes University
Fran Brearton
Professor of Modern Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast
And
Guy Cuthbertson
Professor of British Literature and Culture at Liverpool Hope University
Producer: Simon Tillotson