WILFRED OWEN

greatest war poet in the English language 

WILFRED OWEN  1893 - 1918

On this page

Introduction to Wilfred Owen

Short biography of Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen, the shock of war

The psychological journey of Wilfred Owen

Pictures of the places where Owen fought, died, and his grave.

Introduction to Wilfred Owen

Few would challenge the claim that Wilfred Owen is the greatest writer of war poetry in the English language. He wrote out of his intense personal experience as a soldier and wrote with unrivalled power of the physical, moral and psychological trauma of the First World War. All of his great war poems on which his reputation rests were written in a mere fifteen months.

From the age of nineteen Wilfred Owen wanted to become a poet and immersed himself in poetry, being especially impressed by Keats and Shelley.

He was working in France, close to the Pyrenees, as a private tutor when the First World War broke out. At this time he was remote from the war and felt completely disconnected from it too. Even when he visited the local hospital with a doctor friend and examined, at close quarters, the nature of the wounds of soldiers who were arriving from the Western Front, the war still appeared to him as someone else's story.

Eventually he began to feel guilty of his inactivity as he read copies of The Daily Mail which his mother sent him from England. He returned to England, and volunteered to fight on 21 October 1915. He trained in England for over a year and enjoyed the impression he made on people as he walked about in public wearing his soldier's uniform. 

He was sent to France on the last day of 1916, and within days was enduring the horrors of the front line.

SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF WILFRED OWEN

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen, 1893 - 1918

Born Oswestry, Shropshire. Educated at Birkenhead Institute and Shrewsbury Technical College. 

From the age of nineteen Owen wanted to be a poet and immersed himself in poetry, being especially impressed by Keats and Shelley. He wrote almost no poetry of importance until he saw action in France in 1917.

He was deeply attached to his mother to whom most of his 664 letters are addressed. (She saved every one.) He was a committed Christian and became lay assistant to the vicar of Dunsden near Reading 1911-1913 – teaching Bible classes and leading prayer meetings – as well as visiting parishioners and helping in other ways. 

From 1913 to 1915 he worked as a language tutor in France. 

He felt pressured by the propaganda to become a soldier and volunteered on 21st October 1915. He spent the last day of 1916 in a tent in France joining the Second Manchesters. He was full of boyish high spirits at being a soldier. 

Within a week he had been transported to the front line in a cattle wagon and was "sleeping" 70 or 80 yards from a heavy gun which fired every minute or so. He was soon wading miles along trenches two feet deep in water. Within a few days he was experiencing gas attacks and was horrified by the stench of the rotting dead; his sentry was blinded, his company then slept out in deep snow and intense frost till the end of January. That month was a profound shock for him: he now understood the meaning of war. "The people of England needn't hope. They must agitate," he wrote home. (See his poems The Sentry and Exposure.) 

He escaped bullets until the last week of the war, but he saw a good deal of front-line action: he was blown up, concussed and suffered shell-shock. At Craiglockhart, the psychiatric hospital in Edinburgh, he met Siegfried Sassoon who inspired him to develop his war poetry.

He was sent back to the trenches in September, 1918 and in October won the Military Cross by seizing a German machine-gun and using it to kill a number of Germans. 

On 4th November he was shot and killed near the village of Ors. The news of his death reached his parents home as the Armistice bells were ringing on 11 November.

WILFRED OWEN, THE SHOCK OF WAR

Wilfred Owen's First Encounter with the Reality of War

On 30th of December 1916 Wilfred Owen, having completed his military training,  sailed for France.

No knowledge, imagination or training fully prepared Owen for the shock and suffering of front line experience. Within twelve days of arriving in France the easy-going chatter of his letters turned to a cry of anguish. By the 9th of January, 1917 he had joined the 2nd Manchesters on the Somme – at Bertrancourt near Amien. Here he took command of number 3 platoon, "A" Company.

He wrote home to his mother, "I can see no excuse for deceiving you about these last four days. I have suffered seventh hell. – I have not been at the front. – I have been in front of it. – I held an advanced post, that is, a "dug-out" in the middle of No Man's Land.We had a march of three miles over shelled road, then nearly three along a flooded trench. After that we came to where the trenches had been blown flat out and had to go over the top. It was of course dark, too dark, and the ground was not mud, not sloppy mud, but an octopus of sucking clay, three, four, and five feet deep, relieved only by craters full of water . . ."

The above is a brief extract from Out in the Dark. Owen's letter goes on to tell the story of how one of his sentries was blinded, an experience which is the basis of his poem The Sentry. There is much more about Wilfred Owen in Out in the Dark, and more still in Minds at War. See main index for more information about these books.

© David Roberts and Saxon Books 1998 and 1999. Free use by students for personal use only. 
Extract from Wilfred Owen's letter ©  Oxford University Press 1967.

The landscape near Joncourt, north of St Quentin in northern France. In this region in October 1918 Wilfred Owen killed a number of Germans, captured many more and thereby won his Military Cross.

WILFRED OWEN'S PSYCHOLOGICAL JOURNEY

This short account may give some insight into the development of Owen’s ideas and feelings and into the psychological change that probably takes place in most soldiers. To fight in a war and kill fellow human beings it is necessary to abandon the basic morality of civilised life and this requires painful mental adjustments. This account may be of particular interest to anyone who reads Owen’s poems Insensibility and Apologia Pro Poemate Meo. This is most of the account in Minds at War. Only extracts from letters have been reduced. The full relevant extracts from letters appear in both Out in the Dark and Minds at War.

Three statements by Owen

"All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true poet must be truthful."

"The people of England needn’t hope. They must agitate." Letter 19 January, 1917, shortly after arriving at the front line in France.

"I am more and more a Christian. . . Suffer dishonour and disgrace, but never resort to arms. Be bullied, be outraged, be killed: but do not kill." Letter to his mother, May 1917.

For most of the time he was in the army Wilfred Owen lived and fought as an outsider. By his upbringing, character, religion and philosophy he was totally unsuited to the role of a soldier. He was shy, unoffensive, bookish, introverted, unworldly, sensitive, caring and deeply Christian.

He tried conscientiously to do his duty and play his part. The action he saw and the experiences he had were about as extreme and traumatic as any experienced by other soldiers on the Western Front.

Shortly after Owen had been declared unfit for service because of his shell-shock he reflected in great anguish on the teachings of Christ which he and others were so blatantly ignoring. He wrote to his mother, describing himself as "a conscientious objector with a very seared conscience." ( For further details of Owen’s pacifism at the start of the war see the letter written to his mother, May 1917, printed on page 147 of Minds at War.)

In August in Craiglockhart War Hospital he came under the influence of Sassoon who had just made his famous protest. Owen, too, wanted to make his protest, yet he couldn't identify with pacifists. His principles were locked into conflict. His role as a soldier and patriot demanded one thing: as a Christian, another. Knowing and believing Christ's teaching, with absolute clarity he felt compelled to act in complete contradiction to his convictions. The psychological conflict within him could hardly have been greater.

In a letter in October 1917 he asserted, "I hate washy pacifists." And then, echoing Sassoon's example. "Therefore I feel that I must first get some reputation for gallantry before I could successfully and usefully declare my principles."

In his poetry - even if he had not consciously acknowledged this in his time at the front line - he was now expressing the soldier's loss of moral feeling.

Merry it was to laugh there -

Where death becomes absurd and life absurder.

For power was on us as we slashed bones bare

Not to feel sickness or remorse of murder.

These lines are from Apologia Pro Poemate Meo which Owen wrote in October and November of 1917. In this same period he also wrote a more extended account of the soldier's loss of feelings in Insensibility which he worked on between October 1917 and January 1918: "Their senses in some scorching cautery of battle now long since ironed, can laugh among the dying unconcerned."

By April 1918 he had taken another crucial decision. He had decided to turn his back on life. Talking to his brother whilst home on leave he said that he wanted to return to the front line. "I know I shall be killed. But it's the only place I can make my protest from."

In July, encouraged by Robert Ross (best known as a friend and supporter of Oscar Wilde) and the poet, Osbert Sitwell, Owen began to plan a volume of his poems. For it he wrote his first quick, half-thought-out draft of a preface. Some idea of his thoughts about his role may be gleaned from this.

Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.

My subject is War, and the pity of War.

The Poetry is in the pity.

Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.

On 26th August he was declared fit for front line action and instructed to embark for France. He wrote to Sassoon, "Everything is clear now; and I am in hasty retreat towards the Front." Retreat from life, perhaps, or from himself.

Having joined the Manchesters close to the front line near Amien on 13th September his fear was beginning to show. He wrote to Sassoon, pathetically blaming him for his predicament.

‘You said it would be a good thing for my poetry if I went back. That is my consolation for feeling a fool.

This is what the shells scream at me every time: "Haven't you got the wits to keep out of this?"’

Late afternoon on 1st October, and on through the night, the 96th Brigade of the Manchesters went into action near the villages of Joncourt and Sequehart, six miles north of St Quentin. There was "savage hand- to-hand fighting." At first the Germans were driven back, but they made repeated counter-attacks. Owen threw himself into his task. He wrote to his mother,

I lost all my earthly faculties, and I fought like an angel . . . I captured a German Machine Gun and scores of prisoners . . . I only shot one man with my revolver . . . My nerves are in perfect order.

The psychological change in Owen's personality was now definitely confirmed in action. Before this time we do not know what attempts, if any, he made to kill the enemy. His identification with soldiers and the soldiers' role, and his abandonment of his Christian principles, was now complete. Showing his habitual concern for his mother's feelings he implied that he had killed only one man, but the citation accompanying the Military Cross which he was awarded for his actions that night make it clear that he used the machine gun to kill a large number of men. "He personally manipulated a captured machine gun in an isolated position and inflicted considerable losses on the enemy. Throughout he behaved most gallantly."

He now rationalised his motives. In part, he was thinking as a soldier. Forgetting that he had been ordered there, he wrote,

"I came out in order to help these boys - directly by leading them as well as an officer can ..."

and then he added an idea which had long been with him, seeing himself once again as an outsider to the soldier's role,

"indirectly, by watching their sufferings that I may speak as well as a pleader can."

By killing men he crossed a moral divide between the good and the damned, and in so doing, surrendered his personality to the moral-numbness of front-line soldiers. The real Wilfred Owen no longer existed. The Wilfred Owen who entered the war was dead. His behaviour was no longer the expression of his own will: he was part of a fighting brotherhood, a killing machine. He was impervious to fear, had no sensitivity. He had no self-regard, no self-respect - no self to lose.

From now on his behaviour could be totally reckless being sufficiently rewarded by surges of adrenalin and a sense of heart-warming camaraderie. He wrote to his mother again on 8th October telling her this story of the aftermath of the battle when his company was still surrounded by the enemy.

The letter concluded, "I scrambled out myself and felt an exhilaration in baffling the Machine Guns by quick bounds from cover to cover. After the shells we had been through, and the gas, bullets were like the gentle rain from heaven ... Must write now to hosts of parents of Missing, etc . . ."

Writing of the battle to Sassoon on 10th October he said, "I cannot say I suffered anything; having let my brain grow dull . . . My senses are charred."

Owen knew that the war was nearing its end. The Germans were in full retreat. The British soldiers were welcomed with joyful gratitude by the French, and he was really enjoying himself being part of a band of soldiers. In his last letter to his mother, written on 31st October, he describes the maty atmosphere in his billets, "The Smoky Cellar of Forester's House." Conditions were so cramped that he could hardly write for pokes, nudges and jolts. The room was dense with smoke. His cook was chopping wood and an old soldier peeled potatoes and dropped them in a pot splashing Owen's hand as he did so. It was a scene of perfect soldierly brotherhood, and Owen remarks on his lack of sensitivity to danger.

"It is a great life. I am more oblivious than alas! yourself, dear Mother, of the ghastly glimmering of the guns outside, and the hollow crashing of the shells. . . Of this I am certain: you could not be visited by a band of friends half so fine as surround me here.

Ever Wilfred x"

His mind was now perfectly prepared for his final action. There were now no crucial military objectives, yet the crossing of the seventy feet wide Sambre and Oise Canal, just south of the tiny village of Ors was treated as such. The Germans held the east bank, and were well defended with machine guns. At 5.45 on the morning of 4th November, under a hail of machine gun fire, the Royal Engineers attempted to construct an instant bridge out of wire-linked floats so that Owen's brigade and 15th and 16th Lancashire Fusiliers could cross and destroy or capture the enemy. Group after group of soldiers went forward and were killed or wounded. Wilfred Owen, standing at the water's edge, was encouraging his men when he was hit and killed.

Seven days later the war was over. Church bells rang throughout the country. As they were ringing in Shrewsbury, Susan and Tom Owen received the telegram announcing their son's death.

The Sambre canal just south of the village of Ors where Wilfred own was killed at the age of twenty-five on 4th November 1918. The Germans held the right bank. In those days there was a line of poplars on this side too, though badly damaged by shell fire.

About a mile north of Ors, in the corner of a field and next to the railway line, is the village cemetery. At one end of it is the small British military cemetery, separated from the grassfield by a neat hedge. Wilfred Owen's grave is in the far left corner, third from the left.

Wilfred Owen's grave in the cemetery at Ors, northern France.

Poems by Wilfred Owen
Anthem for Doomed Youth
Dulce et Decorum Est

Back to Main Index

Portrait Copyright © 1999 Saxon Books and James Mitchell. Photographs copyright © David Roberts and Saxon Books 1995. All rights reserved. 
The artist may be contacted on UK phone number  01444 239905.