BBC Radio 3 Hosts Wilfred Owen Week

General Sir Richard Dannatt, Chief of the General Staff, will recite Wilfred Owen's The Chances as part of BBC Radio 3's Wilfred Owen week. He will also discuss his personal responses to Owen's work in the concluding programme of the season, Between The Ears: The Soldier's Poet, to be broadcast on Saturday 18 November 2006.

General Dannatt says: "Wilfred Owen's poems and letters... are a very important expression of what many soldiers feel: that what they're doing they understand, their mates with them understand, but the population, the families, those back home, don't understand.

"I don't think soldiers want necessarily to be praised or feted when they get home, but I think they do want people at home to understand what they've been through."

In the week following Remembrance Day, Radio 3 celebrates the life and writings of Wilfred Owen.

This is the first time the station has featured special programming around a single literary artist.

Radio 3's Between the Ears invited current serving soldiers - including General Sir Richard Dannatt; a woman corporal; one who joined as a boy soldier; and a major who, like Owen himself, was awarded the Military Cross - to read Owen's poems and speak of their impact on people who have served in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Sierra Leone and Iraq.

Some contributors will also bring some of their poems exploring their own responses to conflict.

The complete war poems have been recorded for Radio 3 by actor Ben Whishaw and will be featured across the schedule throughout the week.

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), widely considered to be the greatest war poet in the English language, was killed in action on 4 November 1918 aged 25.

Seven days later, the war officially ended and it was on Armistice Day that his mother received news of his death by telegram.

At the time of his death, only five of his poems had been published.

Owen wrote in the preface to War Poems: "Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War."

His works depict his experiences as a solider and the reality of the trenches and gas warfare.