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I
Wilfred Owen is the best-known war poet in English-language literature, and "Strange Meeting" is arguably not just his most famous poem, but his best. Siegfried Sassoon, his friend and mentor, and the editor of the first fairly extensive collection of Owen's poems, judged it to be his "masterpiece" (Siegfried's Journey 59), although his personal relationship with Owen, as well as with this poem in particular, may have influenced that judgment, and there are others who not only do not see "Strange Meeting" as Owen's masterpiece, but think all or parts of it are plain bad. Questions of quality aside, though, "Strange Meeting" holds a prominent, even premier, position in Owen's corpus because it is one of the cornerstones of the Owen hagiography that developed after his death, and that hagiography in return can, as Desmond Graham notes, lead us "to read Owen slackly, assuming that we already know what he is saying" (24).
This essay examines the genesis of the poem and how knowing that process and the context in which it occurred can alter the way we read it. One alteration is to see that some, though not all, of the poem is indeed bad, but deliberately so. The argument here is that the postwar construction of Owen's life has possibly distorted readings of "Strange Meeting." Always read as an anguished argument against poets being combatants, it can be read, rather, as an argument that poets who would tell the truth about war must not only have experienced its "sharp end" firsthand but also be willing to kill in order to earn the ability to tell that truth.
II
In 1965, Wilfred Owen's brother Harold published Journey from Obscurity: Memoirs of the Owen Family. Two years later came Owen's Collected Letters, co-edited by Harold. Only in 1974 was a full biography published, written by Jon Stallworthy. Since then, numerous biographies have come out, most notably Dominic Hibberd's excellent critical biography in 2002. Prior to the mid-1960s, though, readers had only Siegfried Sassoon's sixparagraph introduction to his 1920 collection of some of Owen's poems, and then Edmund Blunden's essay-length "Memoir," included with his 1931 Owen collection and reprinted in C. Day Lewis's 1963 The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. The bare outline presented of...