Owen A.

Wilfred Owen - Biography

Wilfred Owen is widely regarded as one of the greatest poets of the First World War, with much of his fame coming after the war and therefore his death. Wilfred Owen had been a poetry writer for fun before the war but his work became incredible after he was admitted to Craiglockhart War Hospital for Shellshock in 1917, where he was encouraged to engage in productive labor such as poetry. At Craiglockhart, Owen met Siegfried Sassoon, a fellow poet who was already known for his work before the war, and together they helped each other improve their craft (Cox 1). Siegfried later became a tireless advocate for Owen’s work, becoming a big reason he was recognized for his work. However, Wilfred Owen is not known only for his poems, as he was a brave soldier who was a great leader on the battlefield, which earned him the military cross. Wilfred Owen never got to see his cross nor did any of his poetry become famous as he was killed in battle just one week before the armistice on November 4, 1918, in France.

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was welcomed into this world on March 18, 1893, to Harriet Susan Shaw and Thomas Owen in Shropshire, England. In 1897, after he had turned four, the family moved to Birkenhead, where Owen attended Birkenhead Institute from 1900-1907. In early 1907 the family moved to Shrewsbury where Thomas had been appointed Assistant Superintendent to join the railways. In Shrewsbury Owen attended the Shrewsbury Technical School where he excelled at botany and English. Wilfred grew to like English more and started writing poetry around this time, gathering inspiration from Keat and the Bible, both of which he read regularly. Owen stayed at Shrewsbury Technical until 1911 when he turned 18 and was excited to try and attend University. The Owens were not a family that had a lot of wealth, with Thomas working for the railways and the mother’s family losing their wealth as she grew up. This meant that in order to go to University, Wilfred would have had to get in with the first-class honors necessary to receive a scholarship (Stallworthy xxii). Wilfred passed the exam to get into the University of London but did not receive the scholarship, leaving him unable to attend. While he was disappointed, he accepted an unpaid job from the Vicar of Dunsden that in return for parish duties, Wilfred would have free board, food, and some tuition. Even though the arrangement was not a success, with the Vicar having no interest in Literature and Wilfred losing his interest in theology (the only topic offered for tuition), Wilfred attended botany classes and was encouraged by his work in literature from the head of the department. In his letters to home during this time, we see the first hints of the compassion that would characterize his poems for the Western Front (Stallworthy xxii). He continued the arrangement with the Vicar until 1913 when he admitted that he had a greater passion for English than religion and left Dunsden for France. Dunsden had enhanced Wilfred’s education, where he had learned a lot about mathematics and economics as well as realized his true passion in English. He pursued this passion in France, where he took up a part-time job teaching English at the Berlin School in Bordeaux, and was the happiest he had ever been. Life was going so well for him and he loved France, he even had a gig tutoring an 11-year-old French girl in her parents’ Pyrenean villa, when on August 4, 1914, Germany invaded Belgium (Stallworthy). 

In September of 1915, Wilfred finally returned to England, nearly a year after the United Kingdom and Germany had declared war because he was uncertain whether to enlist or not. He quickly made up his mind and enlisted by October. By June of 1916, he had received a commission as lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment, and on December 29, 1916, he left for France with the Lancashire Fusiliers. In his letters to his mother, he was not very positive about the situation, saying, “The awful state of the roads, and the enormous weight carried was too much for the scores of men”  on January 6, 1917 (Cox 1). It was during these next months that Wilfred wrote his best poetry, including his most famous piece, “Dulce et Decorum est”. Wilfred and his men were under heavy machine-gun fire and were shelled by heavy explosives throughout the cold March. In February Wilfred attended an infantry school in Amiens, however the head injuries that were to come kept taking him out of commission for periods at a time. It started on March 19 when he fell 15 feet into a shell hole searching for a soldier overcome with fatigue (Cox 1). Wilfred was stuck in a cellar at the bottom of that shell hole for three days before he got out. Owen was taken to the hospital where he got some rest but also wrote poems, which became a habit of his in the many hours he would spend in the hospital. He continued to write to his mother about the events that were happening, and on April 25, he wrote, “For twelve days I did not wash my face, nor take off my boots, nor sleep a deep sleep. For twelve days we lay in holes where at any moment a shell might put us out” (Cox 1). Owen was blasted into the air one wet night and had to spend the next few days hiding in a hole too small for him next to the dead body of a friend. Having endured all these experiences from January - April, Wilfred had been to a lot of hospitals between May and June 1917 from the throbbing pain in his head. While he thought it was related to the concussions, he was eventually diagnosed with shell shock and was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, where he met Siegfried Sassoon, changing his life forever. 

At Craiglockhart, they had a different way of curing patients than other places, where they had them actively engaging in physical and mentally stimulating activities to overcome their problems by confronting them instead of lying in bed all day thinking about them. This was all made possible by the Captain, Owen’s doctor, who made Craiglockhart the leading institution for shell-shock treatment through the belief in Freudian psychoanalysis (BBC). Siegfried Sassoon was well-known by this point for being a fantastic poet and Wilfred knew this as well. During their time together at the hospital, they grew quite close with each other, especially after Wilfred confided in him that he was a poet as well. Wilfred’s poetry developed incredibly well also, “with the older poet in Siegfried helping Wilfred, showing him how to channel memories of battle - recurring in obsessive nightmares that were a symptom of shell-shock - into poems” (Stallworthy xxix). This constant engagement of the body and brain worked very nicely with Dr. Brock’s cure for shell shock, allowing Wilfred to heal quicker than expected. However before he left Wilfred was able to write his best poem of all time in Dulce et Decorum est, which centered around the idea of sacrificing yourself for your country, “but he uses it ironically. He does not endorse the phrase but brands it as ‘the old lie’. … ‘It was really the best poetry of the First World War’, Glass said (BBC). In late November, Owen rejoined the 5th Manchesters in Scarborough where on New Year's Eve he reviewed his ‘new life’. He wrote many things, among the most impactful I believe being this line, “I go out this year a poet, my dear mother, as which I did not enter it. I am held peer by the Georgians; I am a poet’s poet”, which shows the impact Siegfried Sassoon and his time at Craiglockhart had on his poetry. Not only was Owen now an incredible poet, but he was also an incredible soldier, choosing to come back to the war to fight for his country, which contradicts his most famous poem, Dulce et Decorum est. He fought hard, leading his men to multiple victories over the German troops at the Beaurevoir-Fonsomme line, and his bravery and leadership earned him the military cross, even though he never lived to wear or even see it. Owen continued to fight in the war until November, where a week before the armistice, as he was helping his men assemble a pontoon bridge under heavy fire, he was struck and killed. On the day of the armistice, As the bells of peace rang out in the streets of England and the cheering was louder than ever, Owen Wilfred’s family received the news of his death. 

After his death, Sassoon carried on Owen’s legacy, popularizing his poems for the world to admire and to ponder on, and that is exactly what the world did. He funded his own education, taught in France, joined the army, led men to victories, got injured, wrote the best WWI poems we know of, came back to the war, and won some more before giving his life to his country. While he might not have been alive to receive this recognition, he will forever be remembered as one of, if not, the greatest poet and voice of the Great War.

Bibliography

Cox, Auryn. “How a Hospital Meeting Inspired Wilfred Owen’s WWI Poetry.” BBC News, 12 Nov. 2023.

Henderson, Alice Corbin, and Wilfred Owen. “Review: The Poet of the War.” JSTOR. Accessed 11 Oct. 2024 

Lee, Stuart. “The Last Days of Wilfred Owen.” Oxford News Blog, University of Oxford. 23 Oct. 2018.

Owen, Wilfred, and Jon Stallworthy. War Poems of Wilfred Owen. Vintage Classics. 2018. 

Owen, Wilfred. “Letters Owen Wrote to His Mother.” Accessed 10 Oct. 2024

Owen, Wilfred. “The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen.” Edited by Edmund Blunden. New Directions Publisher. Accessed 10 Oct. 2024 

Paxman, Jeremy. “Wilfred Owen: A Remembrance Tale.” ˆIMDb.com, 11 Nov. 2007.  

“Wilfred Owen.” Poetry Foundation. Accessed 11 Oct. 2024

Artist Statement

Looking through the lists of people I could choose to focus on for my project, I first searched up the name Owen to see if I could find anyone interesting that shared the same name as me. When I could not find anyone with the first name of Owen, I found Wilfred Owen and I thought he sounded like a pretty cool poet when I read more on him. After doing some more research on him, I decided to center my project around him because of his immense impact on the way people view the cost of war while sacrificing himself for his country. I decided to dramatize his process in writing his most famous and influential poem, "Dulce et Decorum est." This started from Wilfred obtaining shellshock to be checked into the hospital where Siegfried Sassoon helped him along the way. The most difficult part of the process was finishing my script. It was very hard for me to write the complete story that I wanted to tell while keeping it short, but in the end I managed to keep it decently trimmed. Overall a great experience creating this project!