"For those few, those the brave"

Last week we were celebrating "Deviations" first birthday and there was no place for morn in our celebration. I say this because of the 90th anniversary of the death of Wilfred Owen. And today is the 90th anniversary of what Americans know as the "Veterans Day" or the end of WWI with the armistice that took place at the eleventh hour of the elevnth day of the eleventh month.


WWI has been forgotten. Even when this event triggered in all ways the twentieth century history. The warfare is remembered occassionally by few English historians. Just in these occasions Prime Ministers and Persidents show themselves at Verdun to pledge the dead.





Wilfred Owen is not read in Mexico. And I dare to say in Spanish speaking countries. Even though several proffesional attempts have bene made, which are three in all Mexico over ninety years, Wilfred Owen's poetry is still ignored and in some cases outnumbered in English poetry antologies by Robert Graves or Sigfried Sassoon, to name some contemporary War poets. Antologizing Wilferd Owen is in some cases strange; either you ignore him (as in Yeats' case, receiving many criticism) or put it among Rupert Brooke, which will be the common thing.
The attempts to study Owen's poetry in my country are biassed in dull and vain comparissons with Brooke's vision of the world.


I take this quote from CNN.com to validate the presence of Owen's speech today:"In his 2007 autobiography, "The Last Fighting Tommy," written with Richard van Emden, he said 'war is organized murder' before adding at a memorial event last month: 'It was not worth it. It was not worth one, let alone all the millions.'" I urge people to read Owen because of his vision of poetry; that it is still valid unlike the case of Brooke's.





Anyway this post honour each and every man and woman, dead and alive, who served for his/her country in the most brutal war in the twentieth century. A pledge to them. And a remembrance for Owen, who we, or at least I, owe so much.