The James Logan Courier

By Kevin G. Hall
McClatchy Newspapers (MCT)

MERIDA, Mexico — Underscoring the complex nature of the immigration debate, Mexican President Felipe Calderon acknowledged on Wednesday that he has relatives living and working in the United States.

"Yes, I do have family in the United States and what I can tell you is that these are people who work and respect that country," Calderon said in response to a question during a joint news conference with President Bush at the end of Bush's two-day visit to Mexico.

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen, MC (March 18, 1893 – November 4, 1918) was an English poet and soldier, regarded by some as the leading poet of the First World War. His shocking, realistic war poetry on the horrors of trench and gas warfare was heavily influenced by his friend Siegfried Sassoon and sat in stark contrast to both the public perception of war at the time, and to the confidently patriotic verse written earlier by war poets such as Rupert Brooke. Some of his best-known works - most of which remained unpublished until after his death - include Dulce Et Decorum Est, Anthem for Doomed Youth, Futility, and Strange Meeting. His preface intended for a book of poems to be published in 1919 contains numerous well-known phrases, especially 'War, and the pity of War', and 'the Poetry is in the pity'.

He is perhaps just as well-known for having been killed in action at the Sambre-Oise Canal just a week before the war ended, causing news of his death to reach home as the town's church bells declared peace.

Read the War Poems and Manuscripts of Wilfred Owen, free from the University of Oxford's Wilfred Owen Multimedia Digital Archive.