[Julie Steiner]

I've received permission to post a PM'ed correction to my previous comments. So here's the scoop!

14 April 22. Dear Julie, Don’t want to get involved in the rather strange thread about WO’s Strange Meeting but, with respect, when you say “Wilfred Owen was, obviously, Welsh” you are almost certainly wrong.

This was all gone into in detail in D.S. R. Welland’s Wilfred Owen: A Critical Study (Chatto & Windus 1960).

He quotes a letter in the BBC journal The Listener in 1944 after someone in a broadcast referred to WO as a Welsh poet. His sister Mary wrote: “Both our parents were English, and though, no doubt, the name carries the implication of a distant Welsh origin the connection is too far back to affect the fact that we are an English family. Wilfred was born at Oswestry, Salop, and would, I feel sure, have mildly resented the suggestion that he was Welsh."

Your material about Welsh versification etc applies to G. M. Hopkins rather than Owen.

He was born on the English side of the Welsh Border in Shropshire and was for some years at school in Birkenhead (leaving him worried about his brother acquiring a Liverpool accent) and then Shrewsbury back in Shropshire again. According to the rather snobbish Sassoon he had ‘a grammar school accent’ which probably means he spoke with a more or less modified local Shrewsbury/Welsh Border accent.

There is no recording of his voice, but I would guess that when excited or emphatic it probably had a Welsh-sounding lilt (as I remember with the farm workers where I was born and brought up in Herefordshire, the Welsh border county south of Shropshire.)

Welland also exhaustively discusses the possible sources of half-rhyme (or ‘vowel-rhyme’ as WO called it) . Either his own invention from within English, or, more likely, from French writers like Tailhade and Romains.

I stand definitively corrected! Thanks.

[James Brancheau]

Never mind, of course.Way, way off-topic.

[Jennifer Reeser]

"Wilfred was born at Oswestry, Salop, and would, I feel sure, have mildly resented the suggestion that he was Welsh."

I love that -- so let's get real. The best, blessed Good Friday to you, sister.


J