Wilfred Owen: Poetry and Peace.

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 6 November 2018

⏱️ 52 minutes

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Summary

Gillian Clarke, Sabrina Mahfouz and Michael Symmons Roberts respond to the war poet Wilfred Owen with their own new commissions from the Royal Society of Literature. Shahidha Bari hosts a discussion recorded with an audience at the British Library on the 100th anniversary of Owen's death during the crossing of the Sambre–Oise Canal on 4 November 1918, exactly 7 days (almost to the hour) before the signing of the Armistice which ended World War I.

Born in Cardiff, Gillian Clarke’s work has been on the GCSE and A Level exam syllabus for the past thirty years. She was the first woman to win the Wilfred Owen Award – for a sustained body of work that includes memorable war poems – in 2012. Sabrina Mahfouz was brought up in London and Cairo, and is a playwright, poet, novelist and editor. She was elected an RSL Fellow in 2018. Poet and Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, Michael Symmons Roberts grew up less than a mile from Greenham Common and has often written about the Cold War ‘peace’.

Producer: Fiona McLean

Transcript

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1:52.9	In Shrewsbury, the church bells were ringing and the band were playing at noon on Armistice Day when his parents received the telegram breaking the news of his death. He had died just a week
1:58.9	before the declaration of the end of the war, aged just 25.
2:04.0	His name was Wilfred Edward Salter Owen, and today we're marking the centenary of his death
2:09.4	with the Royal Society of Literature at the British Library in London. Remembered now as one of
2:14.6	the greatest poets of his generation, Wilfred Owen recorded the horror of trench warfare
2:19.6	and the moral anguish of those fighting at the front.
2:23.8	Poetry, though, meant everything to him,
2:26.1	so it's fitting that we'll be exploring his legacy with three contemporary poets.
2:30.8	Gillian Clark, who was a national poet for Wales
	...

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