Wilfred Owen

Full name Wilfred Edward Salter Owen. 8 March 1893 - 4 November 1918. British poet who fought in the First World War and wrote about his experience. He died in France one week before the armistice.

Biography

Wilfred Owen was born near Oswestry as one of the four children of Thomas and Susan Owen. His family had its roots in Wales and often changed its place of residence. After having spent several years in Birkenhead, Wilfred's family moved to Shrewsbury in order to move back to Birkenhead only a few years later, where Wilfred was educated at the Birkenhead Institute.

Wilfred Owen, as a member of a religious family, participated in and even taught Bible classes and prayer meetings in 1911-1913 shortly before he moved to France and worked there as a language tutor.

It was in October 1915 when Wilfred, under the social pressure, decided to enlist in the Artists' Rifles Officers' Training Corps. In June 1916 he was then commissioned as the second lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment. During the time he spends at the frontier, Wilfred suffers from shell shock and is taken to the Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, where he meets the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who influences and changes his way of writing immensely. Wilfred learns how to process his war experiences in his poems and starts to include satire, which is a famous characteristics of Sassoon's poems,too. After his stay at the hospital Wilfred Owen returns to the active service in France in July 1918 and is shot and killed shortly after in November 1918 while crossing the Sambre-Oise Canal. The day after his death he is given the rank of Lieutenant. The message of his death reaches his family just before the day of armistice.

Poetry

Wilfred Owen started to write letters and poems at an early age. His first letters are addressed to his mother, as she was the person he had the closest emotional connection to. Although he has started to write poems much earlier, only four of Wilfred's poems were published before his death. Many more followed after he died.

Wilfred Owen is especially known for his poems describing death that surrounded him during war. Additionally he is known for having described the landscapes, the places and the time of war like only few poets did at this time. The turning point in his writing can be set to the day he met Sassoon. He only then started to convert his fear of, anger at and experiences in the First World War in his literature and to make it outstanding while doing so. Many works since his death and nowadays list his letters and poems from the very beginnings until his last days.

Sources

Day Lewis, C. eds. The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. A New Directions Paperbook. New York: New Directions Publishing, 1965.

Knowles, Owen. The Poems of Wilfred Owen. Hertfordshire [place?]: Wordsworth, 1994.

Stallworthy, Jon. Wilfred Owen. London: Pimlico, 2013.

http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/owena.htm#short-biog_owen

http://www.wilfredowen.org.uk/Biography