SOURCE: "The Poems of Wilfred Owen," in The Criterion, Vol. X, No. 41, July 1931, pp. 658–69.

In the following excerpt, Parsons praises Owen's fine sensibility and rich imagination as a realist poet.

Only two poets, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, attempted in any wholehearted sense the realist method … and endeavoured to interpret their reactions to War primarily in terms of objective experience. Of the former Owen's is unquestionably the more compelling voice, not only because the twenty-four poems which comprised, till the recent appearance of [Edmund] Blunden's enlarged edition, his one published book of verse, constitute a complete and altogether unique corpus of war poetry, but because in the main his sensibility is finer and his imagination richer than Sassoon's. Sassoon, moreover, is primarily a lyric poet and a satirist: his realism is only an indirect implication of his satire. Expressing essentially the same attitude as Owen, he writes with...