The iconic image of Wilfred Owen as the ‘poet of pity’ has reinforced a one-dimensional understanding of his poems that are more than just the sum of their emotional impact: they reimagine and exceed his major literary influences.This chapter explores the multi-layered achievement of Owen's work, both formal and thematic, that continues to invite re-reading and interpretation.In bearing witness for those unable and/or unwilling to articulate their war experiences, he turned his perspective outwards, away from the solipsism of his adolescence and pre-war adulthood, towards the soldiers he led and with whom he served. Yet Owen saw only five poems published in his lifetime; his posthumous reputation was shaped by other poets including Siegfried Sassoon, Edith Sitwell, Edmund Blunden, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Jon Stallworthy.This chapter therefore also explores the cultivation of Owen’s mythic status and his poems’ place in national memory.

In the twentieth century, the aftermath of Wilde’s trial generates a new interest in the Dark Lady sequence as a means of heterosexualising Shakespeare and his Sonnets. Their powerful appeal as expressions of male-male desire continues, however, in the work of Wilfred Owen, and the chapter explores the nostalgia and hostility which the Sonnets aroused among soldiers in World War I. Post-war, the Sonnets become a vehicle for modernist poetics through the work of Laura Riding and Robert Graves, and their citation by William Empson makes them central to New Criticism. Whilst the biographical interpretation of the Sonnets intensifies through the Shakespeare novel, the idea of the Dark Lady, focused particularly on Sonnet 130, opens up new possibilities for women and women of colour to re-voice the Sonnets at the end of the century.