Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), English poet. From early youth he wrote poetry, much of it at first inspired by religion. He became increasingly disapproving of the role of the church in society, and sympathetic to the plight of the poor. In 1913, he went to France and taught English there until 1915. Owen made the difficult decision to enlist in the army and fight in World War I (1914-1918). He entered the war in January 1917 and fought as an officer in the Battle of the Somme but was hospitalized for shell shock that May. In the hospital he met Siegfried Sassoon, a poet and novelist whose grim antiwar works were in harmony with Owen's concerns. Under Sassoon's care and tutelage, Owen began producing the best work of his short career; his poems are suffused with the horror of battle, and yet finely structured and innovative. Owen's use of half-rhyme (pairing words which do not quite rhyme) gives his poetry a dissonant, disturbing quality that amplifies his themes. He died one year after returning to battle and one week before the war ended in 1918. Owen was awarded the Military Cross for serving in the war with distinction. Full recognition as a highly esteemed poet came after Owen's death.

Owen's considerable body of war poetry, traditional in form, is a passionate expression of outrage at the horrors of war and of pity for the young soldiers sacrificed in it. Nine of these poems form the text for the choral War Requiem (1962) by the English composer Benjamin Britten. Only four of Owen's poems were published during his lifetime; collected editions were issued in 1920, 1931, and 1964.