By matching the paper, pencil, ink and 24 watermarks of the largely undated manuscripts with those of the poet's dated letters, Professor Jon Stallworthy has been able to disentangle the complex chronology of Owen's work and reveal for the first time the overall development of the poet and successive stages in the development of individual poems and fragments.
The edition is divided into two volumes to enable readers to have text, notes and manuscript material before them at the same time. Volume I contains an Introduction, a Biographical Table, and the text of 110 poems (many with important new readings), and supporting factual and critical notes. Volume II provides the basis for the text of the poems, reproducing many of the manuscripts and the fragments, annotated like the poems. The manuscripts and fragments are reproduced in type-set transcription, showing Owen's reworkings and alterations.
Together with these volumes present more than twice the number of poems and fragments hitherto available, and comprise the most comprehensive and detailed edition of a twentieth-century poet writing in the English language. It is a worthy monument to a man who lived to see only four of his poems in print, but whose work is now known throughout the English-speaking world, and indeed beyond it as the text of Benjamin Britten's great War Requiem.