Wilfred Owen: "Greater Love" and Late Romanticism

In the content and expression of his poetry, Wilfred Owen (I893I9I8) eventually reacted against the Romantic tradition. Critics have explored the impact of only Keats, Shelley, and Yeats on his poetry.1 He was also affected by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Tennyson, Swinburne, and a few other late Romantic poets, who are mentioned in his Collected Letters.2 In some of his early poems he uncritically imitated several authors from this Keats-Tennyson-Swinburne-Wilde line of poets. But in his most important war poems "Greater Love" is a paradigm Owen transcended the nineteenth-century conventions of late Romantic poetry. No critic has recognized that "Greater Love" and "Fragment« Cramped in that Funnelled Hole" are parodies of poems by Swinburne and Tennyson respectively.