Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen (Oswestry, 1893 – Ors, 1918) was an English poet and soldier who wrote in English and is regarded by many critics as the leading poet of the First World War. His importance lies in the way he depicted trench warfare and gas attacks without the confident patriotism that marked much of the verse of the time.

He was born in Shropshire, the eldest of four children. After his grandfather died in 1897, the family moved to Birkenhead and later to Shrewsbury. Owen was educated at the Birkenhead Institute and at a technical school in Shrewsbury. Around 1904, during a holiday in Cheshire, he discovered his vocation for poetry. He was raised as an evangelical Anglican and as a young man read the Bible and the Romantic poets with devotion, above all Wordsworth and Keats. Between 1911 and 1913 he worked as a lay assistant to a vicar near Reading, an experience that left him disillusioned with the Church. He then taught English and French in Bordeaux. When war broke out he did not rush to enlist, although he considered the French army. He finally joined up in 1915, and in 1916 he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment.

Two traumatic episodes changed the way he saw the war. A trench mortar shell threw him onto the remains of a fellow officer, and soon afterwards he was trapped for days in a German trench. Diagnosed with shell shock, he was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, where he met Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon, who was already writing critical war poetry, encouraged him and guided him in matters of style, and Owen found in him a mentor. His therapy included writing down his experiences and dreams, and from 1917 his poetry changed markedly. After convalescence he returned to his regiment and, in Ripon in 1918, he wrote or revised poems such as "Futility" and "Strange Meeting".

The relationship with Sassoon has invited interpretation. Some contemporaries, Robert Graves among them, claimed that Owen was homosexual, and several of his poems contain a homoerotic element that critics have read as central to his vision. Owen regarded Sassoon almost as a hero. His most famous poems, "Dulce et Decorum est" and "Anthem for Doomed Youth", bear the direct imprint of his mentor, though his own voice came to be more admired than Sassoon's. Owen made heavy use of pararhyme, relying on assonance. He was not the only poet of the time to do so, but he was among the first to experiment with it extensively.

In July 1918 he returned to active service in France, although he could have stayed on home duty. He did so largely to take Sassoon's place at the front, since Sassoon had been shot in the head in an apparent friendly-fire incident and sent home for the rest of the war. Owen was killed on 4 November 1918, a week before the Armistice, while crossing the Sambre–Oise Canal. Only five of his poems had been published in his lifetime. Sassoon and Edith Sitwell helped secure publication of the full collection, and interest in his work grew in the 1960s. Benjamin Britten set some of his poems in his War Requiem, and his name remains closely tied to the poetry of that war.