Today in History: Wilfred Owen

Today is the birthday of poet Wilfred Owen, born in Shropshire, England in 1893. When he was young, his family was well-off, living in a house owned by his grandfather, a prominent citizen. But then his grandfather died, it turned out that the old man was broke. The family had to and move into working-class lodgings in an industrial town, and Owen's father worked for a railroad.

He started writing poems as a boy, and he was good at literature and science, but he didn't do well enough on his exams to get a scholarship at a university. Given his family's economic circumstances, without a scholarship he could not attend. He enlisted to fight in World War I, and he became a lieutenant. Initially Owen held his troops in contempt for their loutish behaviour, and in a letter to his mother described his company as "expressionless lumps". However, his viewpoint was to be changed dramatically by a number of traumatic experiences. He fell into a shell hole and suffered concussion; he was blown up by a trench mortar and spent several days unconscious on an embankment lying amongst the remains of one of his fellow officers.

In 1917, he was wounded, diagnosed with shell shock, and sent to a hospital to recuperate. There he met another soldier diagnosed with shell shock, Siegfried Sassoon, who was an established poet and became Owen's mentor. Owen was posted away from the front, mostly at the hospital, through the rest of 1917 and into 1918. Here, his doctor encouraged him to translate his experiences into poetry as a means of coping with his mental condition, and, with Sassoon's feedback, he wrote many of his most famous poems, including "Dulce et Decorum Est" and "Anthem for Doomed Youth." Sassoon's emphasis on personal experience and realism caused major changes in Owen's previous, romantic style.

So Owen was one of the first poets to write realistically about war as actually experienced, in marked contrast to previous poets like Rupert Brooke, who wrote confidently patriotic propaganda poems.

Sassoon returned to the front briefly and then was sent back to the hospital after being shot in the head by an apparent friendly fire incident. Owen appears to have regarded it as his duty to return to the front and continue the artistic direction the two had established. He was killed on November 4, 1918, during the battle to force a crossing of the Sambre-Oise canal, one week almost to the hour before the signing of the armistice that ended the war. Two years later, Poems of Wilfred Owen was published.