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Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

LINKS

http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/jtap/browse.html

This link connects you to the Owen Archive, which contains Owen's poetry manuscripts, letters, as well as photographs, video, and audio files on World War I.

http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/LostPoets/Owen2.html

This link connects you to the Lost Poets of World War I web site hosted by Emory University. It contains a short biography of Owen and selected poems as well as an audio file of a letter Owen wrote to Sir Osbert Sitwell in 1918.

BIOGRAPHY

The son of a railway clerk, Wilfred Owen showed early talent as a poet and despite his mother's encouragement of his love for literature, failed in 1912 to win a scholarship to London University. Instead, he taught English the following year at a Berlitz School in Bordeaux. After the start of the Great War, Owen returned to England in 1915 where he lived for a time at the Poetry Bookshop managed by Harold Monro. Two years later, Owen joined the 2nd Manchesters Regiment where, on the Somme, he was exposed to the trauma of trench warfare. In 1917, Owen suffered a concussion and after prolonged exposure to the violence of war on the front lines was blown into the air by a shell blast. Diagnosed with shell shock, he recuperated near Edinburgh at Craiglockhart Hospital where he met Siegfried Sassoon who helped clarify Owen's poetic aims and introduced him to the author Robert Graves. By the end of 1917, Owen received a promotion to the rank of lieutenant, publishing poems in The Nation and The Bookman. The next year, Owen returned to the front where he was awarded the Military Cross a month before he was killed while leading his command across the Sambre Canal. Of his work as a poet, Owen wrote, "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."

SECONDARY SOURCES

Hibberd, Dominic. Owen the Poet. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986.

—. Wilfred Owen: The Last Year, 1917-1918. London: Constable, 1992.

Kerr, Douglas. Wilfred Owen's Voices: Language and Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

MacDonald, Stephen. Not About Heroes: The Friendship of Wilfred Owen and Sigfried Sassoon. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1983.

McPhail, Helen, and Philip Guest. Wilfred Owen. Barnsley, South Yorkshire: Leo Copper, 1998.

Williams, Merryn. Wilfred Owen. Bridgend: Seren, 1993.

SECONDARY SOURCES BY CHAPTER