Wilfred Owen

March 18, 1893
Oswestry, Shropshire, England
November 4, 1918
Sambre Canal, France

Soldier and poet

Some of the most powerful descriptions of war were written during World War I by the so-called war poets, mostly British soldiers in their twenties who wrote while fighting in France. Wilfred Owen is one of the most important war poets. He wrote eloquently about his service as an officer during the Battle of the Somme, which forced him to wrestle with the conflicts he saw between his duty as a soldier and his deep religious and pacifist beliefs. (Pacifists object to war as a means of settling disputes.) Owen strongly criticized the tragedy of war in his writings, but he fulfilled his military duty out of loyalty to his fellow soldiers. Helping lead his men across a canal in northern France exactly a week before the end of World War I, Owen was killed.

Budding Poet

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born in Oswestry, Shropshire, England, on March 18, 1893. He was the oldest of the four children born to Thomas Owen, a railroad stationmaster, and Susan Shaw Owen, the daughter of a prosperous family. Owen and his parents lived with his maternal grandfather until Wilfred was four; then his family moved to Birkenhead, near Liverpool. Owen attended Birkenhead Institute until he was fourteen, when the family moved back to Shropshire, settling in the county seat at Shrewsbury. There, he attended Shrewsbury Technical School but failed in his efforts to win a scholarship to the University of London. He felt inclined toward religious work and accepted a position in which he received room and board in exchange for work with the vicar (a minister in charge of a church) of Dunsden in Oxford. He left this position partly for health reasons and partly because he came to believe that the established church was failing in its duty to the poor. He returned to his family's home briefly, then accepted a position teaching at the Berlitz School of Languages in Bordeaux, France. During this period, Owen started writing poetry. He admired the writings of the Romantic poets, like John Keats, and he became friends with the poet Laurent Tailhade, who was a fellow pacifist.

After World War I broke out, Owen returned to England and enlisted in the Artist's Rifles, a special air service regiment. Commissioned a lieutenant in 1916, he was sent to fight in France with the Lancashire Fusiliers. It was while he was serving that he began to write his finest poetry, which described in graphic detail the agonies of his fellow soldiers. His most famous poem, "Dulce et Decorum Est," was inspired by Owen's disgust at the use of mustard gas (a poisonous gas that has irritating effects to the body) against his fellow soldiers; the poem's ironic title is part of a Latin motto that means "Sweet and fitting it is to die for one's country." In Owen's judgment, no one who had experienced the horrors of battle would proclaim such patriotic sentiments. In this excerpt from the poem, Owen addresses those who believe in the glory and heroism of war: "If in some smothering dreams you too could pace /Behind the wagon that we flung him in /My friend, you would not tell with such high zest /To children ardent for some desperate glory, /The old lie: Dulce et decorum est /Pro patria mori [Sweet and fitting it is to die for one's country]."

Learning from Other Poets

As his time in the service dragged on, Owen became increasingly bitter about the harsh and brutal conditions of the battlefield. In letters to his mother and in poems, he expressed a deep pessimism about the war, and he began to criticize the political leaders who were, in his mind, responsible for the carnage (killing). In June 1917, suffering from shell shock (a nervous breakdown due to combat conditions), Owen was admitted to Craiglockhart War Hospital for Nervous Disorders near Edinburgh, Scotland. He became editor of the hospital's magazine, The Hydra, in which he published some of his poems as well as those of Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967), another British soldier at the hospital, who went on to become a well-known poet. Owen also taught at a local school and played in an amateur orchestra. This helped him recover from his nervous disorder, and he began to write some of his best poetry.

Through Sassoon's influence, Owen met many of the other prominent poets of the time. Among the literary figures who became his friends and mentors were Robert Graves (1895–1985), Robert Ross (1869–1918), and Charles Scott-Moncrieff (1889–1930). Owen felt that his association with these men gave him the tools he needed to succeed as a poet. He wrote a letter to his mother, quoted in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, in which he compared himself to a ship able to sail on its own, without the assistance of tugboats: "I am a poet's poet. I am started. The tugs have left me. I feel a great swelling of the opening sea taking my galleon [large sailing ship]."

Return to the Battlefield

Despite his pacifist inclinations, Owen resolved to go back to the battlefield out of loyalty to his comrades and in order to write more authentically about the experiences of battle. On December 31, 1917, he wrote in his journal (quoted in the Norton Anthology of English Literature) about the terror he had once seen in his comrades' faces: "It will never be painted, and no actor will ever seize it. And to describe it, I think I must go back and be with them."

By August 1918, Owen had recovered from his illness well enough to return to France. He won a Military Cross for

bravery when he helped lead his company to safety during a battle. On November 4, while leading a group of soldiers across the Sambre Canal, Owen was killed in a hail of machinegun fire. He died four months short of his twenty-sixth birthday—and exactly one week before the armistice (peace treaty) of November 11 brought World War I to an end. . A few months before his death, Owen had written a preface for an edition of his poetry that he hoped to have published. In 1985, an excerpt from this preface—"My subject is War, and the pity of War. The poetry is in the pity…"—was carved into a monument that memorializes sixteen World War I poets in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey in London.

Siegfried Sassoon knew the quality of Owen's verses and arranged to have twenty-three of Owen's poems published. The collection, titled Poems, appeared in 1920; it was edited by Edith Sitwell, a member of a prominent literary family in England. Her brother, Osbert Sitwell, had been a friend of Owen and Sassoon. In 1931, an expanded edition with twenty-nine poems was published, together with an introduction by Edmund Blunden, another notable British poet who had served in World War I. Owen's work has continued to inspire later generations of poets, such as Cecil Day Lewis who in 1964 edited The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, which included seventy-nine poems.

For More Information

Books

Abrams, M.H., et al, editors. Norton Anthology of English Literature. Volume 2; 7th edition. New York: Norton, 2000.

Delany, Paul. Rupert Brooke and the Ordeal of Youth. New York: Free Press, 1987.

Owen, Wilfred. Collected Letters. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Owen, Wilfred. War Poems and Others. London: Chatto and Windus, 1973.

Stallworthy, Jon. Wilfred Owen: A Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Sound Recordings

Britten, Benjamin. War Requiem (op. 66), 1962; recorded by Deutsche Grammophon, Hamburg, 1993.

Films

War Requiem. Directed by Derek Jerman. Mystic Fire Video, 1988. Videocassette.

Web sites

"The Poems of Wilfred Owen." [Online] http://www.pitt.edu/~novosel/owen.html (accessed April 2001).

"The War Poets Collection." [Online] http://www.napier.ac.uk/depts/library/craigcon/warpoets/warphome.htm (accessed April 2001).

"The Wilfred Owen Association." [Online] http://www.191418.co.uk/owen (accessed April 2001).

"WOMDA: The Wilfred Owen Multimedia Digital Archive." [Online] http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/jtap/ (accessed April 2001).

The Poets of World War I

Since ancient times, poets of every culture have made war and soldiering important subjects of their work, in epic poems (long poems) that celebrate heroic exploits, in lyrics and odes that honor the courage of the warrior, or in pacifist works that criticize the brutality and horror of war. Some of the finest verses in the history of English literature were written by poets who served in World War I, many of whom died in combat while still in their twenties.

The following men are among the most prominent of the British war poets:

Rupert Brooke (1887–1915): After brief noncombat duty in Belgium, he died of an infection caused by a mosquito bite; he was serving in the Greek islands at the time. A sequence of sonnets (poems with fourteen lines and a definite rhyme pattern) titled 1914 contains his most famous lines: "If I should die, think only this of me: /That there's some corner of a foreign field /That is for ever England…." Biographer Paul Delany calls Brooke "the most famous British hero of the war."

Robert Graves (1895–1985): Though he was severely wounded in combat in 1916, Graves lived to be ninety. He served as a captain with the Royal Welch Fusiliers during World War I and befriended another member of the regiment, poet Siegfried Sassoon. Graves's collection of war poems, Fairies and Fusiliers, helped establish his reputation as a literary figure after the war. The novel I, Claudius (1934) and the mythological study The White Goddess (1948) are his bestknown works. One of his sons was killed in World War II.

Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918): The son of Russian Lithuanian immigrants to England, Rosenberg enlisted in the British army in 1915, and because he was rather short, he was assigned to the Bantam Battalion, a regiment made up of volunteers who were below the regulation minimum height of 5 feet 2 inches. In the last two years of his brief life, Rosenberg wrote several important versedramas about Old Testament subjects, including Moses and The Unicorn (about King Saul and his wife). Two important poems that he wrote while in military service are titled "Marching" and "Break of Day in the Trenches." Critics regard Rosenberg's "Dead Man's Dump" (1917) as his finest "war" poem. Rosenberg was shot to death while on patrol duty during the Battle of the Somme on April 1, 1918.

Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967): One of the poets who survived long after World War I, Sassoon befriended and encouraged such poets as Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves, and Wilfred Owen. Although he enlisted in the army and received awards for heroism, Sassoon became a pacifist and wrote an antiwar letter, "A Soldier's Declaration," that led some politicians to call for his courtmartial. With Robert Graves's help, Sassoon was committed to a mental hospital instead, but he decided to return to combat so as not to betray his fellow soldiers. In 1919 The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon was published. The final poem celebrates the armistice of 1918 in these words: "…O, but Everyone /Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done."

Edward Thomas (1878–1917): Killed on Easter Sunday, 1917, during the Battle of Arras, the thirty-nine-year-old Thomas was older than most of the other World War I poets, and he had already established his literary career before the war. He was strongly influenced by the American poet Robert Frost (1874–1963). "Rain," one of Thomas's most important "war" poems, written in 1916, includes these lines: "Rain, midnight rain, and nothing but wild rain /On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me /Remembering again that I shall die…" His wife, Helen Thomas, also was a noted poet.