Wilfred Owen: Bugle marks centenary of war poet's death | Hacker News Reader

Wilfred Owen: Bugle marks centenary of war poet's death

bbc.com

27 pointsbrudgers27 comments

I put together a nicely formatted and public domain ebook of Wilfred Owen poetry earlier this year for Standard Ebooks if anyone wants to read:

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/wilfred-owen/poetry

(bonus: vorticist cover art by Paul Nash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Nash_(artist) )

Excuse my peevishness, but your attitude is typical of programmers who decide to dabble in "nice formatting". I downloaded the epub book in the expectation that the typography would be a shambles, and it was.

I get that this is a hobby for you. But the arrogance and vanity of software folks who think they can do typographic design (without any training, eye for type, or respect for the real skill and tradition of typography) just leads to bad results.

This goes very much for http://sile-typesetter.org as well, for example.

I probably sound completely intolerant. What I'm trying to say is: your smugness is misplaced.

It might be more constructive, and interesting for others, if you explained specifically what OP got wrong in their typography.

Not intolerant, I appreciate the quest for perfection! What the project aims for is ‘considerably better that other ebooks’. If there’s more we can do I’d really love to hear it. Obviously to a certain extent we’re constrained by the limitations of HTML and CSS (i.e. ePub’s internals) but any ideas would be welcome on the SE mailing list or directly to me (robin@reala.net).

Also, and just to check, you didn’t run the epub you downloaded through Calibre first did you? Because that does its own internal conversions that can wreck the formatting (I’ve been bitten by this in the past).

2nd also: what reader hardware / software were you using? It’d be good to double-check there’s not a bug we’re missing that isn’t present with any of the core team’s setups.

I downvoted you not because you disliked the typography, but because you chose to attack the poster and not the content. You can dislike the typography all you like, but I can't fathom how you read OP's message and got smugness or vanity. What part, exactly, was smug or vain?

You wrote: "I get that this is a hobby for you. ..."

But then demanded a non hobby level of commitment to the craft.

"..But the arrogance and vanity of software folks who think they can do typographic design (without any training, eye for type, or respect for the real skill and tradition of typography) "

So how does anyone get _in_ to typography, exactly? Is it by having it as a hobby and moving forward or is it only available to people who complete apprenticeships? Who are you to deny anyone their hobby?

"Anyone can contribute to make a Standard Ebook better for everyone!"

https://standardebooks.org/contribute/

Improve it then.

> arrogance

> vanity

> smugness

I'm trying to understand how these personal qualities would apply to the person you responded to. I generally try to avoid coming across as any of these things and so it worries me a bit that I might be completely missing something in my understanding of social skills.

Could you or someone else explain?

You shred someone's effort to produce a PD volume. Yet you don't offer a single constructive criticism or point to any of these glaring and obvious issues from which they may learn. Not even a hint. That to me is smug and arrogant.

I'm no typographer or publisher, but the book appears correctly and neatly formatted, without error. That puts it in a better state than probably 75% of the commercial ebooks I have paid for. From professional publishers.

So personally I think he deserves thanks, not insults.

Typographical passion is no license to break the site guidelines. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't attack anyone personally on HN again, even if they suck at something and you're perfect.

If you'd like an example for how better to treat others on this site, look no further than https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18382766.

The real problem is that typography (and other forms of design) contain a lot of "emporer's new clothes" thinking.

Take 10 ebooks and ask people to rate the typography. The book has to be pretty bad before the general public notice.

And, as others have said, often the professionally produced book is pretty bad.

Poetry was used by all sides during the war and the efforts to get the right poetry were a secret government propaganda effort that wasn't known of at the time.

There was a big fear that the Germans were trying to undermine the morale of people in the UK so poetry was the 'big guns' for seeing off that threat.

The WW1 poets were not having to start from a blank page, a handy anthology of poetry was provided as a starting point, this has plenty of gems from way before the war to remind people what they were fighting for:

https://archive.org/details/spiritofmanantho00bridiala/page/...

There was another battle going on back on the home front, for women's rights. Poetry played a part in this struggle too.

My favorite of his poems is ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decoru...

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin...

Covered Wilfred Owen in some depth in Secondary School, although his poetry is quite depressing compared to say, Rupert Brooke, I was always fascinated with him due in part that I share the same surname with him.

It's common in British school to compare and contrast "The Soldier" with "Dulce et Decorum Est".

Personally the poem which had the most impact on me was "Suicide in The Trenches"[0]. Hit me like a tonne of bricks aged about 14, I read it every Rememberence Day now.

[0] https://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~keith/poems/suicide.html

It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country.

Read: it isn't. It was senseless, and the hope of many of those who lived (and probably many of those who died) was that there would never be another war. It is a pity their hopes for peace weren't realised in the 20th century, and an even greater pity that they don't look likely to be realised in the 21st.

Well, that specific poem is the actual narration of death by mustard gas... nothing sweet or fitting.

It is indeed "the old lie" according to Owen. Full quote:

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori.

While it's true (and tragic) that the Great War did not fulfil the hope that it would end all wars, many of those who served (and died, or lived) would not have agreed that their sacrifice was senseless. They saw the battle against tyranny and for the freedom of their country as the most worthwhile thing they could ever do.

Try John Lewis-Stempel's book Six Weeks[1].

Although his poetry graphically portrays the horrors of war, and does not at all glorify or glamorise it, Wilfred Owen chose to return to the front, though he had been invalided home and could have remained safely in Britain.

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Six-Weeks-Gallant-British-Officer/d...

He chose to because of his belief that the war poets were more accurately reporting the horrors of the front than the journalists of the day.

The peace movement in the UK was spawned from people returning from war who said "never again". In the UK we've had a century of people acknowledging how many people died and for how little, done through song and music and culture more generally.

We don't acknowledge the fact that the war achieved little (except for creating the conditions for the Nazis to thrive in Germany) and was generally opposed by lots of forces around Europe who felt it was not in the interests of workers. By way of example, there was a conference of socialists held in Basel in 1912 which saw the war coming, and which apportioned work to the different social democratic and Labour parties around Europe which was mostly concerned with making sure war didn't break out.

Large numbers of people oppose the war long before it even broke out, and even now, it is hard to say what purpose it served ("plucky little belgium" actually being a substantial force for evil in the world at that point..).

> The peace movement in the UK was spawned from people returning from war who said "never again".

And yet just a couple of decades later, the country went to war again. I don't believe everyone had already forgotten the horrors of 1914-18; but we realised that sometimes it was necessary, despite the cost.

> Power, like fire, can warm or burn. Thousands of years before we vowed "Never again," God commanded us: "Never, ever."

-- Arik Ascherman

I would rather say, a couple of decades later, the Nazis went to war. It's not like not "taking them up on it" would been peaceful. The Nazis would have murdered and razed to the ground either way. The defense against their war was necessary...

> "An end with terror is always better than terror without end."

-- Leaflet #2 of the White Rose

...but I would say their war was not necessary. So bottom line still is that war is good for nothing, if you know what I mean.

And don't forget that there were also fascists in the UK. Those were the people who learned the exact wrong things from WW1, and if only they had existed, the UK would have simply joined the Nazis.

The point is that the alternatives to war are hard but they are always there. The people returning from the first world war wanted them pursued more readily, and had they been pursued more readily in 1914, there would perhaps not have been a war on the same scale or even at all. WW2 was the consequence of the failure to find a rational settlement after WW2.

To say the first world war - or any other - was senseless, is to recognise that there was no existential threat, and there was little real attempt at diplomacy. There were alternatives that didn't involve millions of people being marched to their deaths. At the point at which we acknowledge that, we have to ask why so many died and what for.

Diplomacy is the natural response of normal working people, because historically we're the ones who get mown down by machine guns at the behest of our betters - people who start wars but don't fight in them.

If you feel WW1 was necessary and proportionate in the face of Europe's challenges at the time, I'd be intrigued to hear why. Can you outline the case for war?

Follow up, as I forgot to address this point before: "battle against tyranny" - nearly half of the British soldiers didn't even have the frigging vote.

(As an aside, we didn't "earn" the vote either: it was given out of fear that returning soldiers who had seen action would do what the Bolsheviks did, and murder all the rich people.)

WWI may not have ended all wars, but WWII may have, at least large scale wars between major countries. Some scholars are looking at war casualties since WWII and noticing the absence of large scale conflict. This period of time since 1945 to present is being called by some The Long Peace.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Peace

http://www.correlatesofwar.org/

http://www.fallen.io/shadow-peace/1/

Everyone seems to harp on ‘Dulce et Decorum Est' -- presumably because they had to read it in an English class at some point -- but I always rally liked 'Futility'. It's like you can hear Owen losing his faith in God.

I have English class to thank for showing me his work. I ended up picking up a book of his poetry soon after.

What struck me is his stark change from a Romantic poet to his Wartime poetry. I would like to add the cynicism in "Inspection" as a companion to "Futility" to mirror the loss of faith.

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