Wilfred Owen (1893 - 1918)

Table of Contents:

Short Biography

Wilfred Owen was born the 18th of March 1893 in Oswestry (United Kingdom). He was the eldest of four children and brought up in the Anglican religion of the evangelical school. For an evangelical, man is saved not by the good he does; but by the faith he has in the redeeming power of Christ's sacrifice. Though he had rejected much of his belief by 1913, the influence of his education remains visible in his poems and in their themes: sacrifice, Biblical language, his description of Hell.

He moved to Bordeaux (France) in 1913, as a teacher of English in the Berlitz School of Languages; one year later he was a private teacher in a prosperous family in the Pyrenees.

He enlisted in the Artists' Rifles on 21st October 1915; there followed 14 months of training in England. He was drafted to France in 1917, the worst war winter. His total war experience will be rather short: four months, from which only five weeks in the line. On this is based all his war poetry. After battle experience, thoroughly shocked by horrors of war, he went to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh.

In August 1918, after his friend, the other great War Poet, Siegfried Sassoon, had been severely injured and sent back to England, Owen returned to France. War was still as horrid as before. The butchery was ended on 11th November 1918 at 11 o'clock. Seven days before Owen had been killed in one of the last vain battles of this war.

Owen's Work

His early work was quite conventional; Owen seemed rather a competent follower than a genuine artist.

At Craiglockhart War Hospital Owen met with the war poet Siegfried Sassoon. This meeting seems to have been the real start of Owen's carreer as a mature and genuine poet. Owen's new work first imitated Sassoon's fiercely ironic and colloquial style, attacking upon the consciences of those civilians who were still in favour of the war (cf. "The Dead-Beat"), but he soon fashioned his own style and approach to the war. His most mature works were all created in the very short space between August 1917 and September 1918.

He's probably, together with Sassoon the most important English War Poet. Characteristic of his poetry, is the use of pararhyme, alliteration and assonance. In this he may be considered a precursor of the generation of Auden and Spender.

The popularity of Owen today can be explained by his condemnation of the horrors of war, which remain so terribly actual, but also by his very premature and absurd death. Reading Owen's poetry, one realises that Horace was but a liar when he said " Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori".

The English composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) mixed several poems or fragments of poems by Owen (" Anthem for Doomed Youth", " The Next War", " Sonnet (On seeing a piece of our heavy artillery brought into action)", " Futility", " The Parable of the Old Man and the Young", " The End", " At a Calvary near the Ancre" and " Strange Meeting") with liturgical texts from the "Missa pro defunctis" in his War Requiem, composed in 1962 at the occasion of the re-opening of the cathedral of Coventry, bombed during the second World War.

Sites on the Internet Related to Wilfred Owen and War Poetry

Wilfred Owen

War Poetry

Siegfried Sassoon

References

Wilfred Owen

War Poetry and Prose

Owen's Poems

Early work

Unfinished Poems and Fragments

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