WIlfred Owen

Introduction

Considered the leading English poet of the First World War, Owen is remembered for realistic poems depicting the horrors of war, which were inspired by his experiences at the Western Front in 1916 and 1917. Owen considered the true subject of his poems to be "the pity of war," and sought to present the grim realities of battle and its effects on the human spirit. His unique voice—less passionate and idealistic than those of other war poets—is complemented by his unusual and experimental technical style. He is recognized as the first English poet to fully achieve pararhyme, in which the rhyme is made through altered vowel sounds. This distinctive technique and the prominent note of social protest in his works influenced many poets of the 1920s and 1930s, most notably W. H. Auden, C. Day Lewis, and Stephen Spender.( Caesar, 116)

Discussion

Owen was born in Oswestry, Shropshire, the eldest son of a minor railroad official. A thoughtful, imaginative youth, he was greatly influenced by his Calvinist mother and developed an early interest in Romantic poets and poetry, especially in John Keats, whose influence can be seen in many of Owen's poems. Owen was a serious student, attending schools in Birkenhead and Shrews-bury. After failing to win a university scholarship in 1911, he became a lay assistant to the Vicar of Dunsden in Oxfordshire. Failing again to win a scholarship in 1913, Owen accepted a position teaching English at the Berlitz School in Bordeaux, France. There he was befriended by the Symbolist poet and pacifist Laurent Tailhade, whose encouragement affirmed Owen's determination to become a poet. In 1915, a year after the onset of the Great War, Owen returned to England and enlisted in the Artist's Rifles. While training in London, he frequented Harold Monro's Poetry Bookshop, where he became acquainted with Monro and regularly attended public poetry readings. At the end of his training, he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment; in late 1916 he was posted to the Western Front where he participated in the Battle of the Somme and was injured and hospitalized. Later sent to Edinburgh's Craiglockhart Hospital for treatment of shell-shock, he met fellow patient and poet, Siegfried Sassoon, an outspoken critic of the war, who encouraged Owen to use his battle experiences as subjects for poetry. Owen wrote most of his critically acclaimed poems in the fifteen months following this meeting. After being

discharged from the hospital, Owen rejoined his regiment in Scarborough. He returned to the front in early September 1918 and shortly afterwards was awarded the Military Cross for gallantry. He was killed in action at the Sambre Canal in northeast France on November 4, 1918—one week before the Armistice. He is buried in Ors, France.( Tennyson, 1136)

Major Works

Owen's early poetry is considered to be derivative and undistinguished, influenced by his interest in romantic themes, particularly beauty, much as Keats had been. The emergence of war shattered his idealistic vision of life and caused Owen to rethink his philosophy. He came ...