OWEN, Wilfred.

£3,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Poems. First edition of the defining book of First World War poetry, a pre-publication review copy sent to the war poet Walter J. Turner, with his ownership signature on the front free endpaper.Turner (1889-1946) was the literary editor of the Daily Herald, a post for which he was recommended by Siegfried Sassoon, as well as the dramatic critic for the London Mercury. Both papers carried anonymous reviews of Owen's collection, one or both surely by Turner: the Daily Herald praises the poems as having "the genuine ring of poetry", while the London Mercury lauds Owen's originality and technique, and predicts that his "burning transcripts of suffering" will give him "a permanent place amongst our poets". Photocopies of the reviews are loosely inserted, together with the publisher's review slip, completed in manuscript, anticipating publication on 2 December 1920.A poet himself, Turner's verse left W. B. Yeats "lost in admiration and astonishment"; despite notoriously omitting Owen, Sassoon, and other First World War poets from his Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), Yeats included 12 poems by Turner.Prepared for publication by Sassoon after Owen's death, this slim volume collects all of Owen's best-known poems, including "Futility", "Strange Meeting", "Dulce et Decorum est", and "Anthem for Doomed Youth". Owen began writing many of the poems while staying at Craiglockhart War Hospital, where he met Sassoon in August 1917. Sassoon encouraged him as a poet, and the two men both pu

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