War Poet

Description

Jon Stallworthy wrote his first poems during schooldays shadowed by the Second World War and a mother's memories of a brother and friends killed in the First. At school, too, he was introduced to the poems of Wilfred Owen, whose biography he would later write, and to those of others who would be represented in his Oxford Books of War Poetry (1984, 2nd edition 2014). Many of the most anthologised and ambitious of his own poems - 'No Ordinary Sunday', 'A Letter from Berlin', The Nutcracker', 'A Poem about Poems about Vietnam' - respond to wars that scarred the twentieth century. A recent uncollected poem, from which the book takes its title, sheds piercing light on the dark aftermath of the conflict so bitterly remembered today as 'the war to end wars'.

Jon Stallworthy, born in 1935, was educated at Rugby, in the Royal West African Frontier Force, and at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize of Poetry. A Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature, he is a Professor of English Literature at Oxford. He has published seven books of poetry. His biography of Wilfred Owen won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the W. H. Smith Literary Award, and the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He recently published a life of Louis MacNeice. He has edited Owen's Complete Poems and Fragments, Henry Reed's Collected Poems, and several anthologies.

"[Jon Stallworthy] wears his considerable learning with discretion and elegance and shows mastery of narrative." --"Sunday Telegraph"