Political Poems: 'Strange Meeting' by Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen wrote ‘Strange Meeting’ in the early months of 1918, shortly after being treated for shell shock at Craiglockhart hospital in Edinburgh, where he had met the stridently anti-war Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon's poetry of caustic realism quickly found its way into Owen’s work, where it merged with the high romantic sublime of his other great influences, Keats and Shelley. Mark and Seamus discuss the unstable mixture of these forces and the innovative use of rhyme in a poem where the politics is less about ideology or argument than an intuitive response to the horror of war.
Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.
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Further reading in the LRB:
Seamus Heaney on Auden (and Wilfred Owen): lrb.me/pp6heaney
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This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: lrb.me/ppappleyt In other podcast apps: lrb.me/ppscyt

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Courage was mine and I had mystery Wisdom was mine and I had mastery To miss the march of this retreating world Into vain citadels which are not walled. None will break ranks Though nations trek from progress Owen poured his soul