Literature · Poets

Wilfred Owen

1893–1918 · English

First World War poetry

Wilfred Owen is the most famous poet of the First World War, whose unflinching poems exposed the horror of the trenches and "the pity of War". Encouraged by Siegfried Sassoon, whom he met at Craiglockhart War Hospital in 1917, he wrote most of his major work in little more than a year. He was killed one week before the Armistice, and almost all his poetry was published after his death.

How to spot them

▸"Dulce et Decorum Est" and "the old Lie"; "What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?"
▸Met Siegfried Sassoon at Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh
▸Killed on 4 November 1918 at the Sambre–Oise Canal, a week before the Armistice
▸"My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."

Key works

Dulce et Decorum Est (1917)

A gas attack and a dying soldier expose the 'old Lie' of Horace's line that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country

Anthem for Doomed Youth (1917)

Sonnet contrasting church funeral rites with the guns and shells that mourn the dead

Strange Meeting (1918)

In a dream underworld the speaker meets the enemy soldier he killed: 'I am the enemy you killed, my friend'

Futility (1918)

Soldiers move a dead comrade into the sun, questioning why life was created at all

Exposure (1917–18)

Men freezing in the trenches, with the refrain 'But nothing happens'

Disabled (1917)

A young soldier who has lost his limbs sits in a wheelchair recalling his former life

The Parable of the Old Man and the Young (1918)

Retelling of Abraham and Isaac in which Abraham kills his son 'and half the seed of Europe'

Poems (1920)

Posthumous first collection, edited by Siegfried Sassoon

Key ideas

War poetry of protest and pity rather than patriotic glory
Pioneering use of pararhyme (half-rhyme), as in 'Strange Meeting'
Graphic realism of gas, wounds and trench conditions to confront civilian readers

Quick-fire facts

•Born in Oswestry, Shropshire; admired Keats as a young poet
•Treated for shell shock at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh in 1917, where he met Siegfried Sassoon and edited the hospital magazine The Hydra
•Only five poems were published in his lifetime
•Awarded the Military Cross for bravery in October 1918
•Killed on 4 November 1918 crossing the Sambre–Oise Canal near Ors; buried at Ors Communal Cemetery
•His parents received the telegram announcing his death on Armistice Day, 11 November 1918
•Benjamin Britten set nine of his poems in the War Requiem (1962)
•Appears as a character in Pat Barker's novel Regeneration (1991)

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Sources

Poetry Foundation — Wilfred Owen