Arms and the Boy Arms and the Boy "Arms and the Boy" is a poem by Wilfred Owen. Like Owen's other famous poems, it deals with the atrocities of World War I; in it, he portrays the loss of innocence of a child in the midst of war. Thousands like the boy are drawn into the battlefield, to the tormenting visitations of war. <poem>"Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood"</poem> It seems a wonder that a boy familiar with sticks and stones holds bayonets in the same hands and learns the coldness of death.
Matt Simpson (poet) Matt Simpson (poet) Matt Simpson (13 May 1936 – 8 June 2009) was a British poet and literary critic. He published six full poetry collections, and after retiring from a senior lectureship in English at Liverpool Hope University, wrote numerous books of literary criticism until his death. Simpson was born in Bootle, Merseyside, to a working-class family with a long seafaring tradition, and educated at Bootle Grammar School. In 1955 he won a place at Cambridge, where he read English. For some years after graduating he taught English to overseas students in Cambridge, where he met his German wife, Monika