Wilfred Owen
born March 18, 1893, Oswestry,
Shropshire, Eng.
killed in action Nov. 4, 1918, France
English poet noted for his anger at the
cruelty and waste of war and his pity for
its victims. He also is significant for his
technical experiments in assonance, which
were particularly influential in the 1930s.
Owen was educated at the Birkenhead
Institute and matriculated at the University
of London; after an illness in 1913 he lived
in France. He had already begun to write
and, while working as a tutor near Bordeaux,
was preparing a book of “Minor Poems—in
Minor Keys—by a Minor,” which was never
published. These early poems are consciously
modeled on those of John Keats; often
ambitious, they show enjoyment of poetry as
a craft.
In 1915 Owen enlisted in the British
army. The experience of trench warfare
brought him to rapid maturity; the poems
written after January 1917 are full of anger
at war’s brutality, an elegiac pity for
“those who die as cattle,” and a rare
descriptive power. In June 1917 he was
wounded and sent home. While in a hospital
near Edinburgh he met the poet Siegfried
Sassoon, who shared his feelings about the
war and who became interested in his work.
Reading Sassoon’s poems and discussing his
work with Sassoon revolutionized Owen’s
style and his conception of poetry. Despite
the plans of well-wishers to find him a
staff job, he returned to France in August
1918 as a company commander. He was awarded
the Military Cross in October and was killed
a week before Armistice Day.
Published posthumously by Sassoon, Owen’s
single volume of poems contains the most
poignant English poetry of the war. His
collected poems, edited by C. Day-Lewis,
were published in 1964; his collected
letters, edited by his younger brother
Harold Owen and John Bell, were published in
1967.
