Wilfred Owen in Edinburgh

[old] Wilfred Owen: A New Biography (2002) by Dominic Hibberd.

[Wilfred Owen] was almost ready to begin his annus mirabilis. Identifying himself with other people was not only an ergotherapeutic discipline but also what poets had to do. Keats had said that a poet should be 'continually informing and filling some other body', and Shelley had argued that it was through exercise of the poetic imagination that people could learn morality and love, putting themselves 'in the place of another and of many others', making the pains and pleasures of humanity their own. Wilfred wrote a little poem, 'Six O'Clock in Princes Street', imagining how he could join the happy crowds in town.... But his old ambition to be a meteor-poet, flying above the ordinary, meant he had to follow his own course, not keeping step with the crowd but following 'gleams unsafe, untrue', 'tiring after beauty through star-crowds'.

Six O'Clock in Princes Street from The Collected Poems (1963):

In twos and threes, they have not far to roam,
       Crowds that thread eastward, gay of eyes;
Those seek no further than their quiet home,
       Wives, walking westward, slow and wise.

Neither should I go fooling over clouds,
       Following gleams unsafe, untrue,
And tiring after beauty through star-crowds,
       Dared I go side by side with you;

Or be you in the gutter where you stand,
       Pale rain-flawed phantom of the place,
With news of all the nations in your hand,
       And all their sorrows in your face.

More from The Wilfred Owen Multimedia Digital Archive.