Owen the Poet

In this combined critical study and biography of Wilfred Owen, the author traces his poetic interests and developments and analyzes a number of the later poems. Hibberd based his research on Owen's surviving papers and books. The book is concentrates on three topics: Owen's sexual nature and experience, the consonance between certain recurrent motifs of Decadent literature and recurrent features of Owen's psychic life and the question of Owen's behaviour as a soldier. In each area Hibbert studied the source material for new insights. He discusses the significance for Owen's poetry of many little known elements in his life and shows how Owen's war poems grew out of his earlier verse, presenting it as a culmination rather than rejection of his allegiance to Romanticism. In Hibbert's readings of Owen's work eg "Spring Offensive", he combines close textual analysis with relevant matters from Owen's biography and in addition, he sheds light on other people and events of the period.