The making of a poet: Wilfred Owen’s ‘autobiography’ in letters

How, between 1911 and 1917, Owen became the dazzling poet we know and love is the story told in Jane Potter’s new edition of his selected letters

From magazine issue: 05 August 2023

Wilfred Owen wrote mostly to his mother, but many of the letters were posthumously censored by his brother. [Alamy]

issue 05 August 2023

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Daniel Swift

The making of a poet: Wilfred Owen’s ‘autobiography’ in letters
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Here is the opening of a sonnet written by Wilfred Owen in the spring of 1911: ‘Three colours have I known the Deep to wear;/ ’Tis well today that Purple grandeurs gloom.’ Owen was 18 and had just been on a pilgrimage to Teignmouth in Devon, where his hero John Keats had once stayed.