Regeneration remembered: Day war poets met is celebrated 100 years on
IT WAS as profound a literary meeting as there has been in modern times, a meeting of minds which transformed poetry and mankind’s poetic reaction to war.
Now the historic Scottish meeting between Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, two poets whose lives were momentarily entwined in Edinburgh in 1917, is to be celebrated in a series of special events in Edinburgh
100 years on.
The centenary of Owen’s spell in the city, before he returned to the Western Front where he was killed in 1918, will see a re-enactment of his arrival at Waverley Station and the premiere of a poem by the Makar Jackie Kay, inspired by the meeting of Owen and Sassoon.
There will also be a screening of Regeneration, the film adaptation of Pat Barker’s acclaimed book of the same name about Owen and Sassoon’s time together at the Craiglockhart War Hospital in the capital.
The events will be run by the Scottish Poetry Library.
Dr Neil McLennan, author of a forthcoming book on Owen and Edinburgh, will deliver a Royal Society speech at the Craiglockhart campus of Edinburgh Napier University, and there will be two discussions on Owen and his life and legacy at the poetry library in September and November.
The re-enactment of Owen’s arrival will see an actor attired in the garb of the Great War alight in Edinburgh, accompanied by Peter Owen, the poet’s nephew, and be met by Edinburgh’s Makar, Christine De Luca.
Actors in First World War costume will be on Princes Street, collecting money for Poppy Scotland and handing out Owen’s poem Six O’Clock in Princes Street.
Owen was suffering from trauma from his service in the war, known as “shell shock”, when he was sent to Edinburgh in June 1917. He was already a poet, but his writing changed dramatically after meeting and becoming friends with Sassoon.
Sassoon had been sent to Craiglockhart after making a public declaration, Finished with the War: A Soldier’s Declaration, against the continuation of the war.
Encouraged by Sassoon, in Edinburgh Owen wrote two of his most famous poems, among the best known verse of all war poetry – Anthem for Doomed Youth and Dulce et Decorum Est.
His works were published posthumously – he died on 4 November, 1918 – and his other famous poems include Strange Meeting and Insensibility.
Owen wrote Dulce et Decorum Est at Craiglockhart in early October 1917 and Anthem for Doomed Youth was penned between September and October of the same year. Sassoon helped Owen revise the lines.
Sassoon survived the war and died in 1967.
Their meeting, and their interaction with Dr William Rivers, who treated officers for shell shock during the war, was fictionalised in the Regeneration trilogy.
Colin Waters, of the Scottish Poetry Library, said the “epochal” meeting of Owen and Sassoon should be regarded as important as any literary meeting in history, such as that of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the Lake District in 1800.
He added: “These events are really to underline that this really epochal meeting in literary history happened in Edinburgh, and in one long and sad summer, these two great poets got to know each other, worked together, and changed writing.
“People of Edinburgh should be proud and pleased that it was here that such an event happened in this city.
“Owen was last in Edinburgh on November 4 of that year, and he died a year later, but in that time he wrote so much historic poetry, it was his big year – this is our way of remembering that.”
The talks at the Scottish Poetry Library will address both the subject of shell shock and the legacy of Owen today, and whether his vision of the mud and squalor of the Western Front has become the dominant literary and social image of the First World War.
The events will also include a re-walking of the Pentland Hills, where Owen walked.