Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) was an English poet and soldier of the First World War. His poems, written mostly in the last year of his life, describe with horror and pity the reality of the trenches. He was killed a week before the Armistice.
Before the war
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born on 18 March 1893 at Oswestry, in Shropshire, into a modest family; his father worked for the railways. A devoted reader of Keats, he began writing poetry as a boy.
Unable to afford university, he worked as an assistant to a vicar in Oxfordshire, then taught English in Bordeaux from 1913, where he met the French poet Laurent Tailhade.
The war
Owen returned to England and enlisted in October 1915. Sent to France as an officer with the Manchester Regiment at the end of 1916, he endured the winter in the trenches and, in 1917, was blown into the air by a shell and left among the bodies of fellow officers.
Diagnosed with shell shock, he was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh. There he met the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who encouraged him to write directly about the war; in a few months he wrote his finest poems.
Return and death
Owen chose to return to the front in 1918. He won the Military Cross for bravery in October. On 4 November 1918 he was killed while leading his men across the Sambre–Oise Canal at Ors.
His mother received the telegram announcing his death on 11 November, as the church bells rang for the Armistice. His Poems were published in 1920 by Sassoon.
Anecdotes
Corrected by Sassoon
The manuscripts of Anthem for Doomed Youth show corrections in Sassoon's hand, including the word 'Doomed' in the title. Owen had first called it Anthem for Dead Youth.
'The Pity of War'
Owen drafted a preface for a book he never saw: 'My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.'
Frequently asked questions
When was Wilfred Owen killed?
On 4 November 1918, at the Sambre–Oise Canal in northern France, a week before the Armistice.
Who was Siegfried Sassoon to Owen?
A fellow poet and officer he met at Craiglockhart hospital in 1917, who encouraged and corrected his work and published it after his death.
Did Owen publish poems in his lifetime?
Only five. Almost all his work appeared after his death, in 1920.