http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2826810/Dark-secret-doomed-youth-Warrior-poet-Wilfred-Owen-died-hero-trenches-startling-evidence-unearthed-WWI-scholar-tells-different-story.html
I think the truth with these characters is more complex than the myth that surrounds them allows...
Smacks of sensationalism.
And he can't even quote properly from 'Dulce et Decorum Est'. He quotes: 'Gas! Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! - An ecstasy of fumbling,..'
The lines in fact are 'Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! - An ecstasy of fumbling,..' in both manuscript and print.
It's a hack job and the kind of progressive bollocks that we see all too much of these days. The recent Terry Teachout biography on Duke Ellington was the same, tried to discredit him as composer and man.
It is well known that Owen was gay, he had a bonafide crush on Sassoon and the collaboration and influence on Owen at Craiglockhart is well known. Owen arrived there with shell-shock and was stuttering having been under barrage for four days. My understanding is that shell-shock kicks in after 2.5 days of relentless bombardment, or there abouts. It is true that Owen left a vicarage after falling in love with a young man his own age, but Owen as paedophile and coward is a step too far.
Gosh, do you mean to say that they had gay people in those days as well? It it always looks so nice in old photographs.
As I understand it, every male who was famous and is now dead was actually secretly gay. And there's a book to prove it for each one.
Maybe someone should do an expose about a famous dead male who turns out to have been not gay.
Re W Owen: the fact is until recent eras, people did not know how to respond to paedos (except ghetto style i.e. with violence, which those outside the working classes were usually able to avoid), so such behaviour was often swept under the carpet. It would be good to see these allegations disproved, but if they were true it is believable that his tendencies were never publicised or resulted in prosecution. I assume other historians will look at the evidence and comment on whether or not it stands up.
This is the kind of exchange that the Daily Male generates.
It's his use of half-rhyme wot done it!
He was a genius. I can't think of any other poet of any generation who has equalled his skill in matching sound and sense.
I don't know, like all war poets he was flawed by his subject.
Er ... Byron. Er...Rupert Brooke. Establishment? Flawed? Held up? Discuss - all ye spotty youths!
Last edited by Dudley Clarke (2014-11-13 16:02:05)
Can art and artist be separated?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-30245245
To show how close the past is, Rupert Brooke was a friend of a friend of mine--the actor Reginald Pole. He had known Brooke at Cambridge. Of course, I was very young and Pole was quite old at the time we knew each other.
Such a shame that history doesn't exist.
Everything's an edit.
I recall my dad saying, "The only true history is that of the person who lived it."