Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen 

March 18, 1893 

Oswestry, Shropshire, England 

November 4, 1918 

Sambre Canal, France 

Soldier and poet 

Some of the most powerful descriptions of war were written 

during World War I by the so-called war poets, mostly British 

soldiers in their twenties who wrote while fighting in France. 

Wilfred Owen is one of the most important war poets. He wrote 

eloquently about his service as an officer during the Battle of the 

Somme, which forced him to wrestle with the conflicts he saw 

between his duty as a soldier and his deep religious and pacifist 

beliefs. (Pacifists object to war as a means of settling disputes.) 

Owen strongly criticized the tragedy of war in his writings, but 

he fulfilled his military duty out of loyalty to his fellow soldiers. 

Helping lead his men across a canal in northern France exactly 

a week before the end of World War I, Owen was killed. 

Budding Poet 

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born in Oswestry, 

Shropshire, England, on March 18, 1893. He was the oldest of 

the four children born to Thomas Owen, a railroad stationmaster, 

and Susan Shaw Owen, the daughter of a prosperous 

family. Owen and his parents lived with his maternal grandfather 

until Wilfred was four; then his family moved to Birken- 

“It is now possible to see 

that his gifts were not 

only gifts of genius, but 

other gifts that only the 

gods bestow. . . . He 

wrote more eloquently 

than other poets of the 

tragedy of boys killed in 

battle, because he felt 

that tragedy more 

acutely.” 

—From Jon Stallworthy, Wilfred 

Owen: A Biography. 

Wilfred Owen. Reproduced by 

permission of The Granger 

Collection, Ltd. 

111

The Poets of World War I 

Since ancient times, poets of every 

culture have made war and soldiering 

important subjects of their work, in epic 

poems (long poems) that celebrate heroic 

exploits, in lyrics and odes that honor the 

courage of the warrior, or in pacifist works 

that criticize the brutality and horror of 

war. Some of the finest verses in the 

history of English literature were written by 

poets who served in World War I, many of 

whom died in combat while still in their 

twenties. 

The following men are among the 

most prominent of the British war poets: 

Rupert Brooke (1887–1915): After 

brief noncombat duty in Belgium, he died 

of an infection caused by a mosquito bite; 

he was serving in the Greek islands at the 

time. A sequence of sonnets (poems with 

fourteen lines and a definite rhyme pattern) 

titled 1914 contains his most famous lines: 

“If I should die, think only this of me: / 

That there’s some corner of a foreign field / 

That is for ever England. . . .” Biographer 

Paul Delany calls Brooke “the most famous 

British hero of the war.” 

Robert Graves (1895–1985): 

Though he was severely wounded in 

combat in 1916, Graves lived to be ninety. 

He served as a captain with the Royal 

Welch Fusiliers during World War I and 

befriended another member of the 

regiment, poet Siegfried Sassoon. Graves’s 

collection of war poems, Fairies and 

Fusiliers, helped establish his reputation as 

a literary figure after the war. The novel I, 

Claudius (1934) and the mythological 

study The White Goddess (1948) are his 

bestknown works. One of his sons was 

killed in World War II. 

Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918): 

The son of Russian Lithuanian immigrants 

to England, Rosenberg enlisted in the 

British army in 1915, and because he was 

rather short, he was assigned to the 

Bantam Battalion, a regiment made up of 

volunteers who were below the regulation 

minimum height of 5 feet 2 inches. In the 

head, near Liverpool. Owen attended Birkenhead Institute 

until he was fourteen, when the family moved back to Shropshire, 

settling in the county seat at Shrewsbury. There, he 

attended Shrewsbury Technical School but failed in his efforts 

to win a scholarship to the University of London. He felt 

inclined toward religious work and accepted a position in 

which he received room and board in exchange for work with 

the vicar (a minister in charge of a church) of Dunsden in 

112 World War I: Biographies

last two years of his brief life, Rosenberg 

wrote several important versedramas 

about Old Testament subjects, including 

Moses and The Unicorn (about King Saul 

and his wife). Two important poems that 

he wrote while in military service are titled 

“Marching” and “Break of Day in the 

Trenches.” Critics regard Rosenberg’s 

“Dead Man’s Dump” (1917) as his finest 

“war” poem. Rosenberg was shot to death 

while on patrol duty during the Battle of 

the Somme on April 1, 1918. 

Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967): 

One of the poets who survived long after 

World War I, Sassoon befriended and 

encouraged such poets as Rupert Brooke, 

Robert Graves, and Wilfred Owen. 

Although he enlisted in the army and 

received awards for heroism, Sassoon 

became a pacifist and wrote an antiwar 

letter, “A Soldier’s Declaration,” that led 

some politicians to call for his courtmartial. 

With Robert Graves’s help, Sassoon was 

committed to a mental hospital instead, 

but he decided to return to combat so as 

not to betray his fellow soldiers. In 1919 

The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon was 

published. The final poem celebrates the 

armistice of 1918 in these words: “. . .O, 

but Everyone / Was a bird; and the song 

was wordless; the singing will never be 

done.” 

Edward Thomas (1878–1917): 

Killed on Easter Sunday, 1917, during the 

Battle of Arras, the thirty-nine-year-old 

Thomas was older than most of the other 

World War I poets, and he had already 

established his literary career before the 

war. He was strongly influenced by the 

American poet Robert Frost (1874–1963). 

“Rain,” one of Thomas’s most important 

“war” poems, written in 1916, includes 

these lines: “Rain, midnight rain, and 

nothing but wild rain / On this bleak hut, 

and solitude, and me / Remembering 

again that I shall die. . .” His wife, Helen 

Thomas, also was a noted poet. 

Oxford. He left this position partly for health reasons and 

partly because he came to believe that the established church 

was failing in its duty to the poor. He returned to his family’s 

home briefly, then accepted a position teaching at the Berlitz 

School of Languages in Bordeaux, France. During this period, 

Owen started writing poetry. He admired the writings of the 

Romantic poets, like John Keats, and he became friends with 

the poet Laurent Tailhade, who was a fellow pacifist. 

Wilfred Owen 113

A sign in wartime France 

warning that antigas 

precautions should be taken 

when passing beyond this 

point. Wilfred Owen’s most 

famous poem, “Dulce et 

Decorum Est,” was inspired 

by his disgust at the use of 

poisonous gas. Reproduced by 

permission of Hulton 

Getty/Archive Photos, Inc. 

After World War I broke out, Owen returned to England 

and enlisted in the Artist’s Rifles, a special air service regiment. 

Commissioned a lieutenant in 1916, he was sent to 

fight in France with the Lancashire Fusiliers. It was while he 

was serving that he began to write his finest poetry, which 

described in graphic detail the agonies of his fellow soldiers. 

His most famous poem, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” was inspired 

by Owen’s disgust at the use of mustard gas (a poisonous gas 

that has irritating effects to the body) against his fellow soldiers; 

the poem’s ironic title is part of a Latin motto that means 

“Sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country.” In Owen’s 

judgment, no one who had experienced the horrors of battle 

would proclaim such patriotic sentiments. In this excerpt from 

the poem, Owen addresses those who believe in the glory and 

heroism of war: “If in some smothering dreams you too could 

pace / Behind the wagon that we flung him in / 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 [Sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country].” 


Learning from Other Poets 

As his time in the service dragged on, Owen became 

increasingly bitter about the harsh and brutal conditions of the 

battlefield. In letters to his mother and in poems, he expressed 

a deep pessimism about the war, and he began to criticize the 

political leaders who were, in his mind, responsible for the carnage 

(killing). In June 1917, suffering from shell shock (a nervous 

breakdown due to combat conditions), Owen was admitted 

to Craiglockhart War Hospital for Nervous Disorders near 

Edinburgh, Scotland. He became editor of the hospital’s magazine, 

The Hydra, in which he published some of his poems as 

well as those of Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967), another British 

soldier at the hospital, who went on to become a well-known 

poet. Owen also taught at a local school and played in an amateur 

orchestra. This helped him recover from his nervous disorder, 

and he began to write some of his best poetry. 

Through Sassoon’s influence, Owen met many of the 

other prominent poets of the time. Among the literary figures 

who became his friends and mentors were Robert Graves 

(1895–1985), Robert Ross (1869–1918), and Charles Scott- 

Moncrieff (1889–1930). Owen felt that his association with 

these men gave him the tools he needed to succeed as a poet. 

He wrote a letter to his mother, quoted in the Norton Anthology 

of English Literature, in which he compared himself to a 

ship able to sail on its own, without the assistance of tugboats: 

“I am a poet’s poet. I am started. The tugs have left me. I feel 

a great swelling of the opening sea taking my galleon [large 

sailing ship].” 

Return to the Battlefield 

Despite his pacifist inclinations, Owen resolved to go 

back to the battlefield out of loyalty to his comrades and in 

order to write more authentically about the experiences of battle. 

On December 31, 1917, he wrote in his journal (quoted in 

the Norton Anthology of English Literature) about the terror he 

had once seen in his comrades’ faces: “It will never be painted, 

and no actor will ever seize it. And to describe it, I think I must 

go back and be with them.” 

By August 1918, Owen had recovered from his illness 

well enough to return to France. He won a Military Cross for 


Wilfred Owen’s poems 

described the deplorable 

conditions that soldiers had 

to face on the battlefield, 

like this American soldier 

standing guard during a 

German gas attack in 

France. Reproduced by 

permission of Hulton 

Getty/Archive Photos, Inc. 

bravery when he helped lead his company to safety during a 

battle. On November 4, while leading a group of soldiers across 

the Sambre Canal, Owen was killed in a hail of machinegun 

fire. He died four months short of his twenty-sixth birthday— 

and exactly one week before the armistice (peace treaty) of 

November 11 brought World War I to an end. . A few months 

before his death, Owen had written a preface for an edition of 

his poetry that he hoped to have published. In 1985, an 

excerpt from this preface—”My subject is War, and the pity of 

War. The poetry is in the pity. . .”—was carved into a monument 

that memorializes sixteen World War I poets in the Poets’ 

Corner of Westminster Abbey in London. 

Siegfried Sassoon knew the quality of Owen’s verses 

and arranged to have twenty-three of Owen’s poems published. 

The collection, titled Poems, appeared in 1920; it was 

edited by Edith Sitwell, a member of a prominent literary family 

in England. Her brother, Osbert Sitwell, had been a friend 

of Owen and Sassoon. In 1931, an expanded edition with 


twenty-nine poems was published, together with an introduction 

by Edmund Blunden, another notable British poet who 

had served in World War I. Owen’s work has continued to 

inspire later generations of poets, such as Cecil DayLewis who 

in 1964 edited The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, which 

included seventy-nine poems. 

For More Information 

Books 

Abrams, M.H., et al, editors. Norton Anthology of English Literature. Volume 

2; 7th edition. New York: Norton, 2000. 

Delany, Paul. Rupert Brooke and the Ordeal of Youth. New York: Free Press, 

1987. 

Owen, Wilfred. Collected Letters. London and New York: Oxford University 

Press, 1967. 

Owen, Wilfred. War Poems and Others. London: Chatto and Windus, 1973. 

Stallworthy, Jon. Wilfred Owen: A Biography. Oxford: Oxford University 

Press, 1975. 

Sound Recordings 

Britten, Benjamin. War Requiem (op. 66), 1962; recorded by Deutsche 

Grammophon, Hamburg, 1993. 

Films 

War Requiem. Directed by Derek Jerman. Mystic Fire Video, 1988. Videocassette. 

Web sites 

“The Poems of Wilfred Owen.” [Online] http://www.pitt.edu/~novosel/ 

owen.html (accessed April 2001). 

“The War Poets Collection.” [Online] http://www.napier.ac.uk/depts/ 

library/craigcon/warpoets/warphome.htm (accessed April 2001). 

“The Wilfred Owen Association.” [Online] http://www.191418.co.uk/ 

owen (accessed April 2001). 

“WOMDA: The Wilfred Owen Multimedia Digital Archive.” [Online] 

http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/jtap/ (accessed April 2001).

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