Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen wrote the best-known English poetry of the First World War and was killed a week before it ended. Born in Oswestry in 1893, the son of a railway official, he was raised in comparative poverty in Birkenhead and Shrewsbury, failed to win a scholarship to university, and worked as a lay assistant to a vicar — an experience that left him disillusioned with the church's indifference to the poor — and then as a language tutor in France. He enlisted in 1915 and was commissioned into the Manchester Regiment. He reached the front in January 1917 and within months had been blown into the air by a shell, been trapped for days in a hole beside the remains of a fellow officer, and was diagnosed with neurasthenia. He was sent to Craiglockhart hospital near Edinburgh, where he met Siegfried Sassoon, who was recovering there after his public refusal to continue fighting. Sassoon read his drafts, corrected them, and told him to write from experience rather than from Keats. Almost all the poems for which he is known were written in the following thirteen months. Dulce et Decorum Est describes a gas attack and ends by calling the Latin tag about the sweetness of dying for one's country an old lie. Anthem for Doomed Youth, Strange Meeting and Futility followed. He wrote that his subject was war and the pity of war, and that the poetry is in the pity. He returned to the front in 1918, won a Military Cross, and was killed crossing the Sambre canal on 4 November. His mother received the telegram as the bells rang for the armistice.

• Lived: 1893 CE – 1918 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: poet