First World War Poetry Digital Archive

The Wilfred Owen Collection archival holdings

From a scholar's point of view access to the original manuscripts is essential, since Owen died before hardly any of his work was published - therefore there is much to speculate about authorial intention.

The English Faculty Library, University of Oxford

All of Owen's original poetry manuscripts and some letters written to his mother and siblings, as well as some recieved from Robert Graves, and portrait photographs.

Manuscripts from the Oxford English faculty Library are listed as 'fascicle number. folio number' (e.g. L.f215r means Fascicle L, folio 215 recto). All letters use the reference numbers derived from Wilfred Owen: Collected Letters, Owen and Bell (1967).

The British Library

Add. 43720 / 43721: Poems by Wilfred Edward Salter Owen (d. 1918); circ.

The poems are written on loose sheets of paper, of varying size and shape, and many of them appear in several alternative drafts, without indication as to which Owen regarded as the final version. Twenty-three of them were printed, mainly from this source, by Siegfried Sassoon, Poems of Wilfred Owen, 1920, and again, with thirty-six further poems and some notes and fragments, drawn partly from here and partly from elsewhere, by Edmund Blunden, The Poems of Wilfred Owen, 1931.

Items from both 43720 and 43721 are listed with their folio number.

Private collection of Jill Balcon

Mss draft of "Strange Meeting" originally belonging to Cevil Day Lewis.

Britten-Pears Foundation

Mss draft of "Anthem for Doomed Youth".

Harry Ransom Research Centre, University of Texas

Letters of Wlifred Owen

A selection of letters written by Owen during his War service, mainly to his mother, but also to his siblings. Some of these contain early drafts of his poems.

All letters use the reference numbers derived from Wilfred Owen: Collected Letters, Owen and Bell (1967).

The National Archives

WO 138/74

Various official army orders, his medical records.

WO 95/2397

Selection from the regiment diary of the 2nd Battalion, Manchester Regiment