Of all the poets of the First World War, Wilfred Owen most fires the imagination today. This biography is more than a simple account of his life - the childhood spent in the backstreets of Birkenhead and Shrewsbury, the appalling months in the trenches - it is a poet's enquiry into the workings of a poet's mind.











This paperback reproduces all the widely praised illustrations of the original edition, including drawings by the poet and facsimile manuscripts of many of his greatest poems. As 'a portrait of the artist', the book has proved, as the Scotsman predicted, 'indispensable to any student of Wilfred Owen's life and work'.











Called by Graham Greene 'surely one of the finest biographies of our time', Wilfred Owen won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the W.H. Smith & Son Literary Award, and the E.M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In its use of verse manuscripts to reveal the working of the creative imagination, it inaugurated a new form of literary biography. This edition is revised and updated and includes a new preface by the author.