Wilfred Owen in Perspective

266 guards, the interpretation of nature as a hostile and oppressive environment, of society as a faulty structure not amenable to thorough reformation, and the first hints of the idea of human character as not only complex but disintegrating, all these traits, taken together, bring about the destruction of the Victorian idea logical compromise. Yet the growing subjectivity of Bennett, Moore, Conrad and James is still balanced by an objective reality out there, even if its attributes are brutality, chaos, and unintelligibility. As soon as this outer world becomes completely subsumed under the representation of the mind or the "inner man" alone, the transitional period has changed into modernity. Prof. Goetsch's book is an outstanding achievement. It is based on an impressive number of primary texts both critical and fictional and it takes into account a vast range of secondary literature on the general topic as well as on the individual authors . It is well written and pleasantly unassuming in spite of its massive array of footnotes. The thoroughness of analysis and the felicities of interpretation are matched by the methodologically sound basis of its overall assumptions on the problem of realism and the wide-ranging historical perspective. It commends itself to the reader both as a highly specialized and comprehensive treatment of the theory of the novel and as a generally valid historical guide to the English novel of the period. Its series of monographical essays on the major novelists of the time are thorough introductions and, taken together, virtually amount to a literary history of the period. Even if one may be inclined to deplore the sketchiness of the nonliterary background one cannot but recognize that it must become a standard work on the English novel from 1880 to 1910. Universität Heidelberg Herwig Friedl 6. Wilfred Owen in Perspective Jon Stallworthy. Wilfred Owen; A. Biography (Londi Oxford UP and Chatto & Windus, 197Ό · £6.75. When Wilfred Owen was killed on the bank of the Sambre Canal in November 1918 his poetry was known only to his f8mily and a small select group of friends. In the intervening years his reputation has grown, so that today he is generally considered to be the greatest of the poets of the First World War. During the last twelve years our knowledge of him has been much increased by the publication of a number of books centring on his life and work - the Collected Poems, the Collected Letters, Harold Owen's trilogy, Journey From Obscurity, and Dominic Hibberd's selection, War Poems and Others. It is only now, however, in Jon Stallworthy's biography, that we have been given a balanced picture of the man and the poet. An enormous amount of meticulous and loving research has gone 267 into this life of Owen. All the available information has been carefully sifted; friends, relatives and acquaintances have been talked with; the streets of Oswestry, Birkenhead and Shrewsbury have been walked again, the battlefields of France evoked from peaceful scenes which hide the scars of yet another world war since that in which Owen died. It is not that a great deal of new material has been turned up, but that everything has been placed in perspective. A scrupulous attention has been paid to dates, not infrequently resulting in revised dates for poems and letters which help them to fit more logically into the mosaic of Owen's development. For example, Mr. Stallworthy has pointed out that "from My Diary, July 191^" is written on "the same paper as that used for a number of other poems composed or completed at Craiglockhart" (p. 211), and would thus appear to date from 1917, an assumption that makes Owen's accomplished use of pararhyme in that poem more comprehensible than if it dated from 191^ as has always previously been assumed. What I like most about this book is its coherence. It presents a picture of Owen as man and poet that is all of a piece. The poems are shown to arise naturally out of the life, and they occur as naturally in the text, often in facsimile, in Owen's own handwriting, without the fragmentation that the deliberate taking up of...