Wilfred Owen: Britain’s Tragic War Poet

The First World War was one of the most important events of the twentieth century. Though Europe was the epicenter of the violence, it was a global conflict on a larger scale than any previous war, resulting in millions of fatalities.

One of the most curious aspects of the First World War was the willingness of young men to throw themselves into deadly combat. Britain was no exception, with many enlisting as soon as they could, desperate to serve their country in dark times.

However, they soon learned the truth about this terrible conflict, and there’s one man who captured the horrors of trench warfare better than anybody else: Wilfred Owen.

Wilfred Owen was born on March 18, 1893 in Shropshire, England. Growing up, he was the oldest of four children. His father was a railroad employee who struggled to support the family.

Wilfred and his family moved houses several times in the 1890s, ending up with a house in the town of Birkenhead. Here, Wilfred attended the Birkenhead Institute and was introduced to writers such as William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. He was a clever and hardworking child, developing an academic rivalry with his friend Alec Paton.

At fourteen, Wilfred and the rest of his family moved again, this time to the county of Shrewsbury. His education continued at the Shrewsbury Technical School on the east bank of the River Severn beside the English Bridge.

Wilfred’s exercise books shed light on his studies, which involved epic poems such as Horatius by Thomas Babington Macaulay and The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser. He continued reading and analyzing Shakespearean plays like Macbeth, Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, and King Lear.

Historians are unsure exactly when Owen started to pen his own poetry. But one of his earliest surviving poems is entitled “To Poesy,” which seems to have been inspired by the English poet John Keats.

After graduating from the technical school, he joined the Wyle Cop School (also in Shrewsbury) as a pupil-teacher before working as a lay assistant in Dunsden alongside his studies at University College, Reading. On Sundays, he would assist with Holy Communion, Bible class, Sunday School, and church meetings.

Owen left England in 1913 to work as a part-time English teacher in Bordeaux, France. One year into his time as a teacher, Europe became entangled in one of history’s most notorious conflicts: the First World War.

Following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne) by a Serbian-backed terrorist, Austro-Hungary declared war on Serbia on July 28, 1914. Russia’s support of Serbia brought their French allies into the fray. Germany declared war on Russia and France soon after, and Britain entered the conflict when the Germans violated Belgian neutrality.

Confronted with the prospect of fighting on two fronts, the Germans enacted the Schlieffen Plan. This involved invading France quickly before Russia managed to mobilize. However, the Battle of the Marne in early September resulted in a loss for the Germans, and they were forced to retreat behind the River Aisne, where they started to dig trenches.

Trench warfare–a core part of Wilfred Owen’s war poems–is associated with the First World War more than any other conflict. Mud and filth defined life in the trenches. Moments of terror punctuated long stretches of boredom, with surprise artillery attacks being commonplace.

Artillery was often used to pound enemy trenches and flatten barbed wire, opening the opportunity for soldiers to move across No Man’s Land and capture the enemy trench. In reality, those on the receiving end of the artillery would simply wait until the danger passed, reemerge from safety, and mow down the approaching enemy with machine-gun fire.

Poetry in the Trenches

It’s hard to pinpoint Wilfred Owen’s immediate reaction to the war, for he rarely dated his poetry manuscripts. However, we do know that “The Ballad of Purchase-Money” was one of the first he wrote once the conflict had started.

In contrast to the famous “Dulce et Decorum Est,” this earlier poem presents war in a positive light, viewing it as an honorable pursuit. In September 1915, more than a year after the outbreak of war, Owen returned to England and enlisted. His battalion was posted to Hare Hall Camp in Essex. Here, Owen lived in a barrack hut and trained alongside his fellow soldiers, performing well in musketry, reconnaissance, and drill.

After fourteen months of training, Owen was posted to France on active service. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant and experienced two of the most horrific periods of the First World War: the winter of 1916 to the spring of 1917 and the closing months of the conflict in 1918.

Owen wrote throughout this period, capturing the brutality of trench warfare. “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” one of Owen’s most well-known poems, uses phrases like “choirs of wailing shells” and the “rapid rattle” of machine-gun fire to describe the conditions on the Western Front.

“Exposure” describes how helpless men are before the enemy sights, centering on the futility of the conflict. Similar sentiments are expressed in “Greater Love,” challenging the Victorian romanticization of war.

The final lines of the aforementioned “Dulce et Decorum Est” encapsulate Owen’s perception of the conflict most effectively, describing the “old lie” of dying honorably in the context of war. Having witnessed the appalling conditions on the Western Front, he fervently rejected the romantic image of war he initially described in “The Ballad of Purchase-Money.”

Wilfred Owen didn’t make it to the end of the First World War. On November 4, 1918, just a week before Armistice Day, he was shot dead in France. Though he was physically no more, the poet’s influence was far from over.

At the time of his death, Owen had been an almost-unknown poet. The only people who had read his work were his mother and a small group of poetic friends. Two of these friends, Siegfried Sassoon and Edith Sitwell, edited a collection of Owen’s poems (twenty-three in total) along with other fragments of his work. This collection was published at the end of 1920.

Approximately one decade later, Edmund Blunden (like Sassoon, Blunden was also a poet who had fought in the trenches) edited a larger collection of Owen’s poems. This collection was published in 1931 and helped to elevate the poet’s reputation even further.

Yet Owen’s popularity was still far from its peak. Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, composed for the consecration of Coventry Cathedral in 1962, utilized Owen’s poetry, capturing the imagination of concert-goers and radio listeners. Once again, Owen’s work grew in popularity.

The great war poet’s reputation continued to grow when his younger brother Harold published a three-part memoir entitled Journey from Obscurity: Memoirs of the Owen Family between 1963 and 1965.

Given Owen’s popularity, his works became a subject of debate and analysis among those interested in poetry and the First World War. Dominic Hibberd, for example, published multiple biographies: Owen the Poet (1986), Wilfred Owen: The Last Year (1992), and Wilfred Owen: A New Biography (2002).

As well as inspiring fictional works like Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy (1991, 1993, and 1995) and Stephen MacDonald’s Not About Heroes (1983), Owen’s life and work are now taught at schools and universities across Britain. His poetry has also been translated into multiple languages, including German, French, and Russian.

It’s important to remember Wilfred Owen is one of many British writers who captured the horrors of the First World War. The work of the aforementioned Siegfried Sassoon has also become part of Britain’s remembrance culture.

Unlike Owen, Sassoon enlisted as soon as the war broke out. Though initially enthused by the idea of war, he too became critical of how the conflict was conducted, especially after the Battle of the Somme. His most famous poem, “Suicide in the Trenches,” was published during the First World War in Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918).

Isaac Rosenberg, meanwhile, became known after the war ended. He was a pacifist at heart but joined the army for financial reasons. (He came from a poor, poverty-stricken family in London). During his time in the trenches, Rosenberg wrote many poems, including “Break of Day in the Trenches,” his most well-known work. Like Owen, he died in combat during the final year of the war and became famous long after his death.

Rupert Brooke, on the other hand, achieved fame in 1915. Having won prizes for his poetry and attended the University of Cambridge, he rocketed to fame when his poem “The Soldier” was read out in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London. He died several months later, but like his fellow poets, his work has become part of British culture.

It’s vital to remember, therefore, that Owen’s work is just one segment of a much larger piece of British history. For those who want to dig into the poetry of the First World War, Owen should be seen as a springboard to a wider topic.

As important as it is to acknowledge this fact, there’s a reason Owen is the most well-known war poet in British history. Even more than his contemporaries, this exceptional writer captured the futility and horror of the First World War, exposing the romanticized myth of an honorable death.