Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) was an English poet born in Oswestry, Shropshire, remembered as one of the defining voices of First World War poetry. He worked as a teacher in France before returning to England to enlist in the British Army. Wounded in combat, he was sent to recover at Craiglockhart War Hospital, where he met fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon, whose encouragement proved decisive in shaping his mature work.

Most of the poems for which Owen is remembered were written in the short, intense period between 1917 and 1918, drawing directly on his experience of trench warfare. His verse is marked by unflinching, visceral imagery, dark irony and a deep skepticism toward the patriotic rhetoric used to justify the war, encapsulated in poems such as «Dulce et Decorum Est», «Anthem for Doomed Youth» and «Strange Meeting». Only a handful of his poems appeared in print during his lifetime.

Owen returned to the front and was killed in action on 4 November 1918, one week before the Armistice; his parents received the news on the day the war ended. In 1920, Sassoon edited and published a collection of his war poems, cementing Owen's reputation posthumously. He is now regarded as one of the finest chroniclers of the «pity of war», his work standing alongside that of Sassoon and other war poets as essential reading on the human cost of the conflict.