SOURCE: "Wilfred Owen—A Reassessment," in The Literary Half-Yearly, Vol. XVIII, No. 2, 1977, pp. 85-100.

In the following excerpt, Banerjee supports Yeats's controversial negative view of Owen's poetry and concludes that Owen is overrated as a poet.

[Wilfred Owen has] received sufficient critical attention (mostly favourable) … and there have been numerous critical articles on him or about him. He can also claim to have influenced later poets (e.g. C. Day Lewis held Owen up as one of the literary ancestors of the poets of the thirties in his A Hope For Poetry (1934), and Philip Larkin has mentioned Owen as one of the poets he has, "enjoyed" and he has been "associated with"). Indeed, it is a measure of the esteem in which Owen is held by his admirers and critics that Yeats's strictures on him have generally been taken as evidence of blind-spots in Yeats as critic rather...