Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), English poet, widely regarded as one of the finest war poets of modern times.

Owen was born on March 18, 1893, near Oswestry, Shropshire, and grew up in Birkenhead and Shrewsbury. His earliest surviving poem dates from 1909-1910. Too poor to attend university without a scholarship, in 1911 he became lay assistant at Dunsden (near Reading) to a vicar who shared his family’s evangelical Anglican beliefs. His poetry during the period was obsessed with John Keats in both style and subject. That admiration would never entirely disappear. Imagining how he would feel in battle, Owen believed that the only thing sustaining him would be the language that “Keats and the rest of them wrote”.

In 1913, after a series of disputes, the vicar required that Owen renounce worldly pleasures such as “verse-making”. Obliged to choose between his poetry and an orthodox religious life, Owen’s response was to leave the vicarage. Because many of his diary entries and letters were destroyed as disreputable by his brother after his death, the precise cause of this disagreement remains mysterious, but the objection to his poetry may have been provoked by suspicions about its increasing homoeroticism. Owen had found himself increasingly alienated by the creeds of his upbringing, complaining that Christianity afforded “no imagination, physical sensation, aesthetic philosophy”. Nevertheless, his religious quest continued throughout his life; as he told his mother in 1913, “I have murdered my false creed. If a true one exists, I shall find it.” His searching took him to France, where he worked as a private tutor in Bordeaux, distant enough from the outbreak of war in 1914 for him to observe it with callous humour: the guns, he considered, would “effect a little useful weeding”.

Owen was not alone in underestimating the scale of the conflict, but when its magnitude became apparent, he returned to England in September 1915 to enlist in the Artists’ Rifles. After a commission as a second lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment, he was posted to France in January 1917. His experiences during the following months—including three days spent trapped in a shell-hole under heavy bombardment in no-man’s-land—left him shell-shocked, and in June he arrived for treatment at Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh. There he met his fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon, who had been sent to Craiglockhart after publicly denouncing the military authorities for (so he alleged) prolonging the war. The effects of this new friendship on Owen’s poetry were immediate. As he told Sassoon in November 1917, “you have fixed my life—however short. You did not light me: I was always a mad comet; but you have fixed me.” Almost all of Owen’s best work (including “Futility”, “Strange Meeting”, “Miners”, and “Exposure”) dates from the period between his first meeting with Sassoon and his death in November 1918.

Sassoon gave Owen entry into a literary world that included luminaries such as H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett as well as another young soldier-poet, Robert Graves. For the first time, Owen’s hero-worship of the Romantic poets had found its match: Graves and Sassoon, Owen told his mother, were “already as many Keatses”. His own work briefly emulated Sassoon, as it expressed disdain for the women and old men (bishops, politicians, media barons) who sent the nation’s “doomed youth” to their deaths “like cattle” (“Anthem for Doomed Youth”).

Yet for all his sense of gratitude, Owen grew wary of Sassoon’s influence, his Keatsian belief that poetry should not have a palpable design on its reader resisting the tendency in Sassoon to turn poetry into “a mere vehicle of propaganda”. (Ironically, a similar charge has been levelled at Owen’s best-known poem, “Dulce et Decorum Est”.) Believing that “every poem, and every figure of speech should be a matter of experience”, Owen tacitly argued for a first-hand engagement with war that included its “exultation” (as he termed it) as well as its horror and futility. And although he memorably captured the bond between soldiers in “Strange Meeting”—“‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend’”—he was also capable of murderous anger: “thinking of the eyes I have seen made sightless, and the bleeding lads’ cheeks I have wiped, I say: Vengeance is mine, I, Owen, will repay”.

In the summer of 1918, Owen returned to France, and was awarded the Military Cross for bravery in action. He was killed by machine-gun fire on November 4, a week before the Armistice. “I came out in order to help these boys,” he had told his mother the previous month, “directly by leading them as well as an officer can; indirectly, by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them as well as a pleader can. I have done the first.” Although only five poems appeared during his lifetime, the international popularity of successive posthumous editions of his work has guaranteed the second as well.