Owen, Wilfred
Owen, Wilfred (1893–1918). Most gifted of the poets who died in battle, though it was the war which transformed him from a minor follower of Keats and Shelley into a writer of the first rank. He joined up in 1915 but a meeting with Siegfried Sassoon at Craiglockhart military hospital two years later was crucial to his development: ‘You have fixed my life—however short.’ The poems he produced over the next twelve months go beyond Sassoon's more straightforward assault on complacency at home, but he was not primarily interested in technical innovation: ‘I am not concerned with Poetry’, he wrote, ‘The Poetry is in the pity.’ Describing himself as a ‘conscientious objector with a very seared conscience’, solidarity with the men under his command took him back to the front. In October 1918 he won the Military Cross and the following November he was killed in action on the Sambre canal, a week before the Armistice.
John Saunders
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Owen, Wilfred