Political Poems: 'Strange Meeting' by Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen wrote ‘Strange Meeting’ in the early months of 1918, shortly after being treated for shell shock at Craiglockhart hospital in Edinburgh, where he had met the stridently anti-war Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon's poetry of caustic realism quickly found its way into Owen’s work, where it merged with the high romantic sublime of his other great influences, Keats and Shelley. Mark and Seamus discuss the unstable mixture of these forces and the innovative use of rhyme in a poem where the politics is less about ideology or argument than an intuitive response to the horror of war. Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/ppapplesignup In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/ppsignup Further reading in the LRB: Seamus Heaney on Auden (and Wilfred Owen): https://lrb.me/pp6heaney Get in touch: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices