Two Great War Poets: Ivor Gurney and Wilfred Owen
Wednesday 9 November
Lecture Theatre 8W 1.1
To coincide with Armistice Day and to mark the publication of their new Penguin Classics selection, "Three Great War Poets: Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen", Jon Stallworthy and Jane Potter will discuss the life and work of Gurney and Owen. The distinctive and moving voices of these young men of the English underclass reflect the disparate experiences of ordinary soldiers in war. Their poetry, while bearing witness to suffering and horror, also captures man's humanity in the most inhumane of circumstances.
For more lectures, see the full Autumn 2011 GULP programme.
Prof Jon Stallworthy and Dr Jane Potter
Professor Jon Stallworthy, FBA, is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University and a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. His books include 'Rounding the Horn: Collected Poems'; two critical studies of Yeats's poetry; two prize-winning biographies, 'Wilfred Owen' and 'Louis MacNeice'; a fragment of autobiography, 'Singing School'; and a collection of essays, 'Survivors' Songs: from Maldon to the Somme'. He has also edited Wilfred Owen's Complete Poems and Fragments, The Penguin Book of Love Poetry, The Oxford Book of War Poetry and, with others, The Norton Anthology of English Literature and The Norton Anthology of Poetry.
Dr Jane Potter is Senior Lecturer in Publishing at the Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies, Oxford Brookes University. Her publications include 'Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print: Women's Literary Responses to the Great War 1914-1918' (2005), 'The Bible and the Great War Poets' in The Blackwell's Companion to the Bible in Literature (2008), and an edition of the First World War novel 'Good Old Anna' by Marie Belloc Lowndes (2010). She is Editor of 'The Wilfred Owen Association Journal'.