Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born on March 18, 1893, at Plas Wilmot, a house near Oswestry in Shropshire, close to the Welsh border. He was the eldest of four children of Tom Owen, a railway employee, and Susan Shaw Owen. The family's circumstances declined after the death of Susan's father forced the sale of Plas Wilmot in 1897, and the Owens moved first to Birkenhead and later to Shrewsbury as Tom's railway postings changed ^[1].

Owen was educated at the Birkenhead Institute and then at Shrewsbury Technical School. His mother was devoutly evangelical, and her influence shaped both his early piety and his lifelong habit of writing her long, confiding letters. He began composing verse in his teens, reading Keats with particular devotion, and the sensuous, musical qualities of Romantic poetry marked his style long before the war gave him a subject ^[1][2].

Money kept him out of university. He passed the University of London matriculation exam in 1911 but not with the honours that would have brought a scholarship. Instead he took a post as lay assistant to the vicar of Dunsden in Oxfordshire, a period that ended in 1913 with his health shaken and his faith in institutional religion badly eroded. He then moved to Bordeaux, where he taught English at the Berlitz School and later worked as a private tutor, and he was still in France when war broke out in August 1914 ^[1][3].

Owen did not rush to enlist. He remained in France through the first year of the war, weighing his options, and returned to England in 1915. In October of that year he joined the Artists Rifles, and in June 1916 he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment ^[1][4].

He crossed to France at the end of December 1916 and reached the front in January 1917, in one of the coldest winters of the war. His letters to his mother from those weeks describe holding a flooded dugout in no man's land under bombardment, and men freezing in the open. In March he fell into a cellar and suffered concussion; in April, near Savy Wood during the fighting around St. Quentin, a shell burst close to him and he spent days sheltering near the scattered remains of a fellow officer. He was diagnosed with neurasthenia, the condition commonly called shell shock, and evacuated ^[1][4].

In June 1917 Owen arrived at Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh. The posting turned out to be the decisive event of his creative life. His doctor, Arthur Brock, encouraged purposeful activity as therapy, and Owen edited the hospital magazine, The Hydra, taught at a local school, and wrote steadily ^[4][5].

Siegfried Sassoon, already a published poet and a decorated officer, was sent to Craiglockhart in the summer of 1917 after making a public protest against the conduct of the war. Owen, who admired Sassoon's poems, introduced himself nervously and asked him to sign copies of his book. Sassoon read Owen's drafts, took him seriously, and pushed him toward the direct, colloquial treatment of the war that Sassoon's own verse practised ^[2][5].

The effect was immediate. Between August 1917 and the autumn of 1918 Owen wrote or drafted nearly all the poems on which his fame rests, among them Anthem for Doomed Youth, which Sassoon helped him revise, Dulce et Decorum Est, Exposure, Futility, and Strange Meeting. He fused the technical inheritance of Keats with what he had seen in the line, and he developed a distinctive use of pararhyme, pairing words such as escaped and scooped, so that his verse sounds slightly and deliberately off key ^[2][3].

Through Sassoon, Owen also entered literary London. He met Robert Graves at Craiglockhart and later Osbert Sitwell, H. G. Wells, and Arnold Bennett. Only five of his poems appeared in print during his lifetime, several of them in The Hydra and in the journal The Nation, but by 1918 he was drafting a preface for a planned collection. Its most quoted sentences declare that his book is not about heroes, that his subject is war and the pity of war, and that the poetry is in the pity ^[1][2].

Owen was discharged from Craiglockhart in the autumn of 1917 and spent months on light duties in Scarborough and Ripon, where he continued to revise his poems. He could probably have seen out the war in a home posting. Instead, after learning of the deaths of friends and feeling that his authority to speak for soldiers required him to share their risk, he returned to France in September 1918 ^[1][4].

On October 1 and 2, 1918, during the assault on the Beaurevoir-Fonsomme line near Joncourt, Owen led his company after its other officers were hit and captured an enemy machine gun position. For this action he was awarded the Military Cross, though the award was not gazetted until after his death ^[1][4].

On November 4, 1918, the Manchesters attempted to cross the Sambre-Oise Canal near the village of Ors under heavy fire. Owen was killed at the canal bank while helping his men across on rafts. He was 25. The telegram announcing his death reached his parents in Shrewsbury on November 11, 1918, as church bells were ringing to mark the Armistice. He is buried in the communal cemetery at Ors ^[1][4][6].

The closest relationship of Owen's life was with his mother, Susan. He wrote her hundreds of letters, and the surviving correspondence, later collected and published, is the principal source for his biography, giving an unusually intimate record of his moods, ambitions, and experiences at the front ^[3][7].

Owen never married. Many scholars, drawing on his poems, his letters, and his friendships within Sassoon's largely homosexual literary circle, have concluded that he was attracted to men, though the evidence is indirect and some of his letters were destroyed or censored by his brother Harold, who edited the family papers and wrote a three-volume memoir of the family ^[3][7].

His religious feeling never entirely disappeared after Dunsden, but it changed shape. The poems repeatedly test Christian language against the facts of the trenches, and pieces such as At a Calvary near the Ancre treat the suffering of soldiers through the imagery of the Passion while condemning the churches and the press that urged the war on ^[2][3].

Owen died almost unknown as a poet. Sassoon and Edith Sitwell prepared the first collection, Poems, published in 1920, and Edmund Blunden produced an enlarged edition with a memoir in 1931. His reputation grew steadily between the wars and rose sharply from the 1960s, helped by C. Day Lewis's 1963 edition of the collected poems and by Jon Stallworthy's authoritative 1974 biography and later two-volume edition of the complete poems and fragments ^[2][3][7].

In 1962 Benjamin Britten set nine of Owen's poems alongside the Latin Mass for the Dead in his War Requiem, written for the consecration of the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral. The work carried Owen's words to audiences far beyond readers of poetry and fixed his status as the representative voice of the war ^[8].

Today Owen is a fixture of school curricula in Britain and beyond, and Dulce et Decorum Est is among the most widely taught poems in the English language. He is commemorated in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey among sixteen poets of the Great War, on memorials in Shrewsbury and Oswestry, and at the Maison Forestière near Ors, the house where he spent his last night, now preserved as a memorial. Anyone asking who was Wilfred Owen encounters a writer who compressed the experience of an entire generation into a single year of mature work, which is why any Wilfred Owen biography is also a history of how the war came to be remembered ^[2][6].