SOURCE: "Wilfred Owen: World War and Family Romance," in University of Hartford Studies in Literature, Vol. XIV, No. 2, 1983, pp. 63-74.

In the following excerpt, Butler examines Owen's unconscious personal conflicts as a source of his poetry's power.

Wilfred Owen's poems are generally considered the finest written about the First World War in English by a participant. Yet no study I am aware of has developed an adequate synthesis of all three of the most crucial aspects of his achievement: his astonishingly sudden and complete maturation as a poet; his rapid and profound assimilation of the overwhelming experience of modern warfare; the continuity as well as the differences between his juvenile and mature work. I think it was Owen's ability to perceive significant continuity between his pre-war and war-time experiences that made his remarkable achievement possible. War experience similarly galvanized his friend Siegfried Sassoon from a very minor Edwardian...