Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) is now generally accepted to be the finest poet of the First World War, whose writing helped to define the term 'War Poet'. Although he is widely studied, and has been the subject of a number of biographies and critical books, Owen, the man and the writer, has still to stand completely revealed. To celebrate Owen's centenary, Merryn Williams has written a ground-breaking new study. In it she discusses Owen's brief life and its effect upon his development as a poet and his great ambition. Influenced by the Romantics and the Georgians, Owen can hardly have envisaged writing the poems for which he is now famous, but through them he achieved his aim to become a great and original poet. Williams's analysis of many of Owen's most popular poems is accompanied by an exploration of his legacy to war (and anti-war) poets from Siegfried Sassoon to Tony Harrison. The morality of war and peace, changing attitudes towards war, particularly in women, the changing technology of war itself and its effects on writers, all come within the scope of a challenging discussion.