Yates thought Oren was a terrible poet and tried to sort of attack him at every possible opportunity. He excluded him from the Oxford Book of Modern v. because he had a distaste for certain poems written in the midst of the Great War. There's not much coming back from that, in a sense, but what Yates does say is he criticizes him for the very things that Owen learned from Yates.
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