Robert Christoforides’ Books Including Biographical Novels

Robert Christoforides has produced five books regarding the life and works of Wilfred Owen.  Those who have an interest in the 1st World War, Wilfred Owen and/or Poetry will find much of interest in the books.

Robert Christoforides has spent over 24 years taking a serious interest in Wilfred Owen who was an English-Welsh poet and soldier and who became one of the leading poets of the First World War.

Robert’s books available to purchase on Amazon Kindle (Kindle links provided in the text below) include:-

BOOK I      “PRESENTIMENTS”
BOOK II     “INFERNAL SURVIVALS
BOOK III    “CHANCE’S STRANGE ARITHMETIC or THE GODS’ INDIFFERENCE

A biographical novel is written, perhaps, to tease out the meaning of a life.

It seeks to describe the life of an artist – in this case the life of a Poet Wilfred Owen – but it may be impossible to portray such a life in all its true fullness; just as Shelley wrote of the somewhat esotericism surrounding poets…

This is an epic and monumental novel.

It has no ‘agenda’ – its original, and always-unresolvable ‘quest’, was to ‘enquire’ into the creative process and its originations … in this case the poetic processes pursued by Wilfred Owen.  It traces the life of this man from (before) birth to (after) death.

 

Wilfred Owen Fragments Book Cover
WILFRED OWEN MONOGRAPH FRAGMENTS OF PEACE AND WAR – THE ‘COMPLETION’ OF STRANGE MEETING – 80 NEW POEMS CONSTRUCTED FROM THE FRAGMENTS: EXAMINATION OF THE … OF PEACE AND WAR IN 4 BOOKS Book 1)

This is the first of 4 books comprising a Monograph on the Poetry of Wilfred Owen – with emphasis on the unfinished or incomplete poems – particularly Strange Meeting – all these ‘new’ poems are rendered into reading and performing versions – about 80 ‘new’ poems in all. This first book also includes several essays.

THE SILVER SWAN

The Silver Swan, who,

Living had no note,

When Death approached,

Unlocked her silent throat,

Thus sung her first and last,

And sung no more:

Farwell all joys;

O Death,

Come close mine eyes;

More geese than swans now live,

More fools than wise

Text of the Madrigal composed by Orlando Gibbons –

originally printed in 1610

The years of Wilfred Owen’s life ‘coincided’ with yet another rather conflicted ‘era’; that of the Oscar Wilde scandal and the pioneering work of Havelock Ellis.Ellis was born on 2 February 1859. He died on 8 July 1939. He was a British physician, writer and social reformer who studied human sexuality. He was co-author of the first medical textbook in English on homosexuality in 1897 – his fundamental assertion was that homosexuality was neither a disease nor in any way immoral.
But, notwithstanding, society, at the time, placed homosexuals at the extremist margins of society – they were utterly condemned and criminalised by society and the Law; although there was some current of general ‘toleration’, so long as the person concerned was neither seen nor heard of as blatantly homosexual.

All this prurient and ‘persecuting’ publicity would have, without doubt, powerfully influenced the Owen family into destroying so much of Wilfred’s correspondence and papers after his death, so far as any such might have implied that he was homosexual.

Bringing together, with the Poems currently well known, the previously ‘unseen’ poetry of Wilfred Owen, (with its ‘lines hidden in plain sight’), it could be useful to consider sexuality, and its relevance, in such context and in the general context of the time.

This book explores the hidden meanings behind the lines of 59 of Wilfred Owens’s poems.