Wilfred Owen born 18 March 1893 (d. 1918)Born in Oswestry in Shropshire, the Owen family lived in a large house owned by his grandfather, but on his death in 1895, the family were forced to move to lodgings in Birkenhead. He was educated at the Birkenhead Institute and at Shrewsbury Technical College.
Shortly after leaving school in 1911, he passed the entrance exam for the University of London, but failed to achieve a scholarship so worked as an assistant to the Vicar of Dunsden and as a pupil-teacher at a school. He also worked as private tutor at the Berlitz School in Bordeaux, France.
In 1915, he enlisted in the army and, after training, was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment.Owen started the war as a cheerful and optimistic man, but he soon changed forever. Initially, he held his troops in contempt for their loutish behaviour, and wrote to his mother calling his company 'expressionless lumps'. However, Owen's outlook on the war was to be changed dramatically after two traumatic experiences. Firstly, he was blown high into the air by a trench mortar, landing in the remains of a fellow officer. Soon after, he became trapped for days in an old German dugout. After these two events, Owen was diagnosed as suffering from shell shock and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh for treatment. While recuperating there he met a fellow poet with whom he would be forever associated - Siegfried Sassoon.
Although he had written poetry for years, his style was changed dramatically by the influence of Sassoon, who encouraged him to write from experience - this combined with his innovative use of rhyme, and his best work was a direct result - incl. Dulce et Decorum Est, Anthem for Doomed Youth & Strange Meeting. There is no evidence that their relationship was closer than friendship, but Owen's letters suggest that he was in love with Sassoon.
Wilfred Owen returned to active duty in France in the summer of 1918. He could have chosen to remain on home-duty, but seems to have taken a symbolic decision to return to the front in place of Sassoon, who had been invalided out of the war by his injuries, that he might continue to document the horrors of war.
Wilfred Owen was killed in battle while attempting to cross the Sambre-Oise Canal with his unit, on November 4th 1918. The war ended a week later. His mother received the telegram on Armistice Day. He was 25 years old. He was posthumously awarded the Military Cross.
Wilfred Owen saw a mere handful of his poems published in his lifetime. Following his death, his work was championed by Sassoon and later, others. The 1960s saw a renewed interest in the poets of the First World War, and Wilfred Owen has come to be regarded as perhaps the leading voice of that doomed generation.
He is generally now accepted as having being homosexual through indications in some of his poems, his circle of friends in London, his letters - although his brother is acknowledged to have destroyed or edited hundreds of these. His sister-in-law, Mrs Harold Owen donated all the manuscripts, documents, photographs and personal effects of Wilfred's that her late husband had owned, to Oxford University in 1975.
Dulce et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.