'Tonight he noticed how the women's eyes Passed from him to the strong men that were whole.' The true horror of the trenches is brought to life in this selection of poetry from the front line. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. Wilfred Owen (1893-1918). Owen is available in Penguin Classics in Three Poets of the First World War: Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen.

Leading poet and former professor of English Literature, Jon Stallworthy, tells the story of the lives and work of twelve major poets of the First World War and provides selections of their best work. The First World War began with flag-waving, parades and poets inspired by abstract ideals. In part this reflected the national mood , but it revealed an almost universal failure to understand what modern mass warfare would really mean. The story of the 'war poets' is also the story of an awakening to the full horror of what the twentieth century came to know as 'The Great War'.Wilfred Owen said, 'My subject is War - and the pity of War'. He also said 'true Poets must be truthful'. The best war poetry was the work of writers who were also serving soldiers and was born out of their desire to tell the truth about what it was to be a soldier in the trenches - what it felt like, what it did to you and what it did to your fellow soldiers, friend or foe. The greatness of the poetry lay not just in the writer's talent, but in the unflinching accuracy with which it portrayed their terrible circumstances.

“The very content of Owen’s poems was, and still is, pertinent to the feelings of young men facing death and the terrors of war.” —The New York Times Book Review Wilfred Owen was twenty-two when he enlisted in the Artists’ Rifle Corps during World War I. By the time Owen was killed at the age of 25 at the Battle of Sambre, he had written what are considered the most important British poems of WWI. This definitive edition is based on manuscripts of Owen’s papers in the British Museum and other archives.

The horrors of the First World War released a great outburst of emotional poetry from the soldiers who fought in it as well as many other giants of world literature. Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke and W B Yeats are just some of the poets whose work is featured in this anthology. The raw emotion unleashed in these poems still has the power to move readers today. As well as poems detailing the miseries of war there are poems on themes of bravery, friendship and loyalty, and this collection shows how even in the depths of despair the human spirit can still triumph.

In the Spring of 1926, the corpses of three men are found in shallow graves off the beaten path in Epping Forest outside of London—each shot through the heart and bearing no identification. DCI Alec Fletcher of Scotland Yard, the lead detective, is immediately given two urgent orders by his supervisor at the Yard: solve the murders quickly and keep his wife, the Honourable Daisy Dalrymple Fletcher, away from the case! Thankfully, Daisy's off visiting their daughter at school. But when a teacher is found dead, Daisy is once again in the thick of it. As Daisy tries to solve one murder, Alec discovers that the three victims in his case were in the same Army company during World War I, that their murders are likely related to specific events that unfolded during that tragic conflict, and that, unless the killer is revealed and stopped, those three might only be the beginning.

This volume contains all of Owen's best known work, only four of which were published in his lifetime. His war poems were based on his acute observations of the soldiers with whom he served on the Western front, and reflect the horror and waste of World War One.