The George Jack Memorial Lecture: 'They are my only diary': Wilfred Owen, A Life in Letters Dr Jane Potter, Oxford Brookes University

In commemoration of George Barr Jack (1946 to 1999).

Celebrated as one of the greatest poets of the First World War, Wilfred Owen is less recognised as an accomplished prose writer. Yet as Dominic Hibberd has argued: “[E]ven if he had written no poems he would deserve to be remembered as one of the finest letter-writers of his century.”

This paper will explore the ways in which Owen's letters not only provide the raw material for his poetry, but are intrinsic to a rounded view of the man and the poet. Owen kept ‘no Diary', so his correspondence functions as his autobiography and reveals a young man's ‘journey from obscurity' to become a respected ‘poet's poet', complex, thoughtful, and often wickedly witty.

A mature, unique poetic voice emerges from Owen's correspondence, forged in the crucible of war, but also rooted in years of emotional turmoil and literary apprenticeship. Compiled, edited and interpreted after Owen's death by various hands, the letters, in their very materiality and conservation, also expose the competing public and private interests in Owen's reputation over the course of 100 years.