When, on New Year's Eve 1917, Wilfred Owen proudly told his mother ‘I am a poet's poet’, he spoke more truly than he knew. He meant, as he wrote, that he was ‘held peer by the Georgians’, poets associated with the Georgian Poetry anthologies edited by Edward Marsh. His work had been praised first (and for him most importantly) by Siegfried Sassoon, and then by Robert Graves and Harold Monro.

We can see him now as ‘a poet's poet’ in two other senses, only one of which he would have recognized. As a boy, he had bound himself apprentice to a Master, John Keats, and by close study and emulation grafted his own early work on-to the Romantic tradition. It was a fortunate – not to say inspired – choice, because he and Keats had more in common, in terms of temperament and talent, than he could have known. Owen warmed to the sensuality and musicality of the older poet, and Keats's physicality (heightened by his study of anatomy and experience of illness) accorded with his apprentice's own precocious awareness of the human body. Owen's earliest extant poem, ‘To Poesy’ (written in 1909–10), owes much to the theme and diction of Keats's ‘The Fall of Hyperion’ and speaks of arms, face, eyes, hands, heart, tongue, brow, brain. ‘Uriconium’ (written in 1913) anticipates even more clearly the tender physicality of Owen's mature work. Porphyro, in Keats's ‘Eve of St Agnes’, had ‘set / A table’ with delicacies for the sleeping Madeline.