SOURCE: "Wilfred Owen and the Soldier Poets," in The Review of English Studies, Vol. 40, No. 160, November, 1989, pp. 516-30.

In the following excerpt, Norgate commends Owen's poetic need to "break out of the closed circle of meaning guarded by the Soldier Poets."

It is …almost a critical commonplace that Wilfred Owen's poetry is full of echoes—he was, as he described himself, "a poet's poet." Innumerable allusions bear witness to his wide reading in the Romantic/Victorian tradition, and the influence of Georgian contemporaries is also evident—Monro, Gibson, and Graves, as well as (obviously and pre-eminently) Sassoon. Similar uses and transformations have been observed of material from classical literature and from the Bible. In Owen's war poetry, reference and allusion has almost always an ironizing function. The primary thrust of this irony is generally in one of two directions—towards the situation of war itself, or towards the...