OWEN, Wilfred; Siegfried SASSOON (introduction); [Edith SITWELL]. Poems by Wilfred Owen.

The Poet, the Editors, and the Scholar

OWEN, Wilfred; Siegfried SASSOON (introduction); [Edith SITWELL]. Poems by Wilfred Owen. London. Chatto & Windus. 1920.

4to. Original red buckram, printed paper spine label; pp. ix, [iii], 33, [iii]; photographic portrait frontispiece with tissue guard; slightly sunned, label toned but legible, corners and extremities rubbed, spine chipped at head and foot, some browning to endpapers, light abrasion to front pastedown (erased old inscription ‘Esmé …’); a very good copy; half-title inscribed by Edith Sitwell to Joseph Cohen (‘For Joseph Cohen | who protects this great poet | in memory of a most |happy evening’), dated 9 April 1957, from Cohen’s library with his small printed shelflabel to rear pastedown, two loosely inserted printouts, highlighted and annotated on ‘Dulce et decorum est’ and on the present edition of Owen’s poems presumably in Cohen’s hand.

A remarkable association copy of the first collection of Wilfred Owen’s poetry, widely considered the finest poems to emerge from the First World War, this copy inscribed by Edith Sitwell, the volume’s acknowledged though uncredited editor, to Tulane University professor Joseph Cohen (d. 2013), scholar of First World War poetry.

Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) died one week before the Armistice, his mother reportedly receiving news of his death as bells were tolling to announce the war’s end. Only four of his poems were published during his lifetime, but he is best remembered for a group of poems mostly written between August 1917 while he was being treated for shell shock at Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh (where he met Siegfried Sassoon), and his return to the front line in France in early summer 1918.

This slim volume appeared two years after Owen’s death and is at once marked by friendship and loss.

Sassoon’s heartfelt introduction remains one of the finest early tributes to the poet: ‘The importance of his contribution to the literature of the War cannot be decided by those who, like myself, both admired him as a poet and valued him as a friend. […] I can only affirm that he was a man of absolute integrity of mind.’ This is followed by Owen’s own brief preface, found ‘in an unfinished condition, among [his] papers’:

Above all, this book is not concerned with Poetry.

The subject of it is War, and the pity of War.

The Poetry is in the pity.

When Edith Sitwell, who had never met Owen (but had published seven of his poems in the November 1919 issue of Wheels, dedicated to his memory), expressed a wish to edit a selection of Owen’s work, Sassoon, ‘stirring himself at last, insisted that Owen had wished him to do this’ (Egremont). Owen’s mother sent any manuscripts she could find, but ‘the rush of Sassoon’s life [soon] intervened’. In January 1920 he went to New York, leaving the material with Sitwell, having done no work on it. The slim volume that appeared in December 1920 includes a brief acknowledgment: ‘For the preparation of this book thanks are primarily due to Miss Edith Sitwell.’

Sassoon later conceded that Sitwell had done all the editing, blaming her for the volume’s shortcomings. This copy is inscribed by Sitwell “For Joseph Cohen / who protects this great poet / in memory of a most / happy evening, the 9th of April / 1957, from Edith Sitwell.” No other copies inscribed by Sitwell have been traced in commerce. Cohen, a scholar of First World War poetry and biographer of Isaac Rosenberg, was a professor at Tulane University. In 1965, a year after Sitwell’s death, Cohen published the influential article ‘Owen Agonistes’ (English Literature in Transition, 1965, later issued in pamphlet form) which sought to uncover what described as a ‘conspiracy’ of silence regarding Owen’s homosexuality. His work on Owen can be seen as a reaction against Sassoon’s claim in the introduction ‘[a]ll that was strongest in Wilfred Owen survives in his poems; any superficial impressions of his personality, any records of his conversation, behaviour, or appearance, would be irrelevant and unseemly.’

We have been unable to find any record of other copies inscribed by Sitwell.

White, p. 12. See Egremont, Siegfried Sassoon: A Biography (2005).

SKU: 2124814