There's writing and talk about Owen being gay as indeed Sassoon was it's very difficult to say definitively what somebody's experiences I think there is no doubt that Owen fell in love with men. He had attractions to women at certain points too so to say Owen was gay is a little too stark for the complexity of human emotion and experience, he says. We don't have evidence for many of the things that may have been alleged over the years about his relationship with men physical relationships we don't have any evidence of that according to him.
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