Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen, MC (March 18 1893 – November 4 1918) was an English poet.
Biography
Early life
Owen was born the eldest of four children at Plas Wilmot, a house near Oswestry in Shropshire on 18 March 1893 of mixed English and Welsh ancestry. At that time, his parents, Tom and Susan Owen, lived in a comfortable house owned by his grandfather, but, on his death in 1897, the family was forced to move to lodgings in the back streets of Birkenhead. He was educated at the Birkenhead Institute and at Shrewsbury Technical School, and discovered his vocation in 1903 or 1904 during a holiday spent in Cheshire. Owen was raised as an Anglican of the evangelical school. His early influences included John Keats, and, as with many other writers of the time, the Bible.
Shortly after leaving school in 1911, Owen passed the matriculation exam for the University of London, but not with the first-class honours needed for a scholarship. In return for free lodging and some tuition for the entrance exam, Owen worked as lay assistant to the Vicar of Dunsden and as a pupil-teacher at Wyle Cop School. Prior to the outbreak of World War I, he worked as a private tutor at the Berlitz School in Bordeaux, France.
War service
On 21 October 1915, he enlisted in the Artists' Rifles. For the next seven months, he was in training at Hare Hall Camp in Essex. In January 1917 he was commissioned as a second lieutenant with The Manchester Regiment. After some traumatic experiences, which included leading his platoon into the Battle of the Somme and getting trapped for 3 days in a shell-hole, Owen was diagnosed as suffering from shell shock and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh for treatment. It was whilst recuperating at Craiglockhart that he was to meet fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon, an encounter which was to transform Owen's life.
After returning to the front, Owen was to lead units of the Second Manchesters on 1 October 1918 to storm a number of enemy strongpoints near the village of Joncourt. For his courage and leadership in this action he was posthumously awarded the Military Cross.
Poetry
Owen is regarded by some as the leading poet of the First World War, known for his war poetry on the horrors of trench and gas warfare. His great friend, the contemporary poet Siegfried Sassoon had a profound effect on Owen's poetic voice, and Owen's most famous poems (Dulce et Decorum Est and Anthem for Doomed Youth) show direct results of Sassoon's influence. Manuscript copies of the poems survive, annotated in Sassoon's handwriting. Owen's poetry would eventually be more widely acclaimed than that of his mentor. While his use of pararhyme, with its heavy reliance on consonance, was both innovative and, in some of his works, quite brilliant, he was not the only poet at the time to utilise these particular techniques.
As for his poetry itself, its content was undeniably changed by his work with Sassoon. Sassoon's emphasis on realism and 'writing from experience' was not exactly unheard of to Owen, but it was not a style of which he had previously made use. Sassoon himself contributed to this by his strong promotion of Owen's poetry, both before and after Owen's death. Nevertheless, Owen's poetry is quite distinctive, and he is generally considered a greater poet than Sassoon.
Thousands of poems were published during the war, but very few of them had the benefit of such strong patronage, and it is as a result of Sassoon's influence, as well as support from Edith Sitwell and the editing of his poems into a new anthology in 1921 by Edmund Blunden that ensured his popularity, coupled with a revival of interest in his poetry in the 1960s which plucked him out of a relatively exclusive readership into the public eye.
Few realize that he never saw his own work published, apart from those poems he included in The Hydra, the magazine he edited at the Craiglockhart War Hospital.
Relationship with Sassoon
Owen held Sassoon in an esteem not far from hero-worship, remarking to his mother about Sassoon that he was "not worthy to light his pipe". Surviving letters show quite clearly that he was in love with Sassoon (Parker, P. "The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public School Ethos" Constable, London 1987, pp193-194) but there is no evidence that Sassoon (who was primarily homosexual) reciprocated his feelings, or that their relationship ever became sexual. Indeed, Sassoon rarely mentions him in either letters or diaries from the time, and in 1946 described his behaviour at Craiglockhart War Hospital as 'consistently cheerful'.
Wilfred Owen was devastated by Sassoon's decision to return to the front, though he left Craiglockhart before Sassoon did. He was stationed in Scarborough on home-duty for several months, during which time he associated with members of the artistic circle into which Sassoon had introduced him, including Robert Ross and Robert Graves. He also met H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett and it was during this period he developed the stylistic voice for which he is now recognised.
Death
In July of 1918, Owen returned to active service in France, though he might have stayed on home-duty indefinitely. His decision was almost wholly the result of Sassoon's being sent back to England. Sassoon, who had been shot in the head, was put on sick-leave for the remaining duration of the war. Owen saw it as his poetic duty to take Sassoon's place at the front, that the horrific realities of the war might continue to be told. Sassoon was violently opposed to the idea of Owen's returning to the trenches, threatening to "stab [him] in the leg" if he tried it. Aware of his attitude, Owen did not inform him of his action until he was once again in France.
Owen was killed in action on 4th November 1918 during the crossing of the Sambre-Oise Canal, only a week before the end of the war. His mother received the telegram informing her of his death on Armistice Day, as the church bells were ringing out in celebration. He is buried at Ors Communal Cemetery. There are memorials to Wilfred Owen at Gailly, Ors, Oswestry and Shrewsbury. There is also a small museum dedicated to Owen and his close friend Sassoon at a Napier University building.
Sexuality
Homoeroticism is a central element in much of Owen's poetry. Through Sassoon, Owen was introduced to a sophisticated homosexual literary circle which included Oscar Wilde's friend Robbie Ross, writer and poet Osbert Sitwell, and C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, the translator of Proust. This contact undoubtably broadened Owen's outlook, and increased his confidence in incorporating homoerotic elements into his work.
The development of Owen's sexuality has been somewhat obscured because his brother, Harold Owen, removed what he considered discreditable passages in Owen's letters and diaries after the death of their mother. (Harold was also responsible for changing the commendation of Wilfred's Owen's Military Cross so that it looked less bloodthirsty and more in keeping with the popular perception of the sensitive officer poet.) Owen also requested that his mother burn a sack of his personal papers in the event of his death, which she faithfully did. The suppression of Owen's sexuality was continued by his early biographers.
Literary output
Only five of Owen's poems had been published before his death, one of which was in fragmentary form. His best known poems include Anthem for Doomed Youth, Dulce Et Decorum Est, The Parable of the Old Man and the Young, and Strange Meeting. Some of his poems feature in Benjamin Britten's War Requiem.
Owen's full unexpurgated opus is in the academic two-volume work The Complete Poems and Fragments (1994) by Jon Stallworthy. Many of his poems have never been published in popular form.
In 1975 Mrs Harold Owen, Wilfred's sister-in-law, donated all of the manuscripts, photographs and letters which her late husband had owned to the University of Oxford's English Faculty Library. As well as the personal artifacts this also includes all of Wilfred's personal library and an almost complete set of The Hydra - the magazine of Craiglockhart War Hospital. These can be accessed by any member of the public on application in advance to the English Faculty librarian.
References in popular culture
- Pat Barker's 1991 historical novel Regeneration explored Owen's relationship with Sassoon and with W. H. R. Rivers, his doctor.
- Owen is the assumed narrator of the song "Owen's Lament" by Australian band Augie March.
- The first verse of "Anthem for Doomed Youth" is recited by Bruce Dickinson as an introduction to the live performance of "Passchendaele" on the Iron Maiden live album "Death on the Road".
- A portion of his poem "Greater Love" features at the end of the song Muerte, by Hip hop group Jedi Mind Tricks.
- Susan Hill's novel Strange Meeting takes its name from a poem by Owen of the same name.
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- Wilfred Owen - The Last Year, 1917–18. Dominic Hibberd. 1992.
- Wilfred Owen: A New Biography. Dominic Hibberd. 2003.
External links
- Works by Wilfred Owen. Project Gutenberg
- Wilfred Owen Multimedia Digital Archive, at Oxford University
- The Wilfred Owen resource page at warpoetry.co.uk
- Selected Poems at Poetseers
- Wilfred Owen Association
- Details of Wilfred Owen's burial place (Commonwealth War Graves Commission)
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