Wilfred Owen in uniform, c. 1916. Wikimedia Commons · public domain.
Poet · Pairing VI
Wilfred Owen
1893–1918 · Soldier and poet of the First World War
“My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.”
Wilfred Owen is the most widely read English poet of the First World War — and he wrote almost all of his enduring work in a little over a year. He enlisted in 1915, served as an officer on the Western Front, and experienced the trench warfare, gas attacks, and shell fire that would fill his verse with an unprecedented physical honesty.
In 1917, suffering from shell shock, he was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, where he met the poet Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon’s influence — and Owen’s own conviction that patriotic verse was concealing the reality of the war — produced poems of extraordinary force, including “Dulce et Decorum Est,” “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” and “Strange Meeting.”
Owen was killed in action on 4 November 1918, at the age of 25 — just one week before the Armistice that ended the war. Almost all of his poetry was published after his death, gathered by Sassoon in 1920. His famous preface — “the Poetry is in the pity” — became the manifesto of modern war poetry.
In this curriculum
Read him in Pairing VI — The Reality of Conflict →