Owen, Wilfred

born March 18, 1893, Oswetry, Shropshire, Eng.

died Nov. 4, 1918, France

British poet.

Owen was already writing verse before he enlisted in the army in 1915, but the experience of trench warfare brought him to rapid maturity; the poignant poems he wrote after January 1917 are full of anger at the cruelty and waste of war and pity for its victims. A week before the armistice, he died in action at age 25. His single volume of poems, published posthumously, is noted for its experiments in assonance. Benjamin Britten's celebrated War Requiem (1962) is a setting of Owen's poems.

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▪ British poet

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 (Sassoon, Siegfried), 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.

Additional Reading

Harold Owen, Journey from Obscurity, 3 vol. (1963–65), is a memoir written by his brother. Jon Stallworthy, Wilfred Owen (1974, reprinted 1988); and Jon Stallworthy (ed.),The War Poems of Wilfred Owen (1994), emphasize the war's effect on Owen's poetic development. Adrian Caesar, Taking It Like a Man: Suffering, Sexuality, and the War Poets (1993), links poetic expression to sexual identity in the poetry of World War I.

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