His subject was war, and the pity of war. Wilfred Owen’s preface to his poetry was found among his papers in an unfinished condition; he had hoped to publish his work in 1919. “All the poet can do today is to warn,” he added. “That is why the true poets must be truthful.”
Owen had experienced at first hand the pain inflicted by war and knew of what he wrote. “Red lips are not so red/As the stained stones kissed by the English dead,” are the opening lines to Greater Love, in which he describes in graphic, violent detail the “piteous mouths that coughed” and “hearts made great with shot”.
Much of Owen’s poetry was written in a creative burst while he was a patient at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, where the cries of traumatised patients echoed in the corridors. It was there that he met other men who would become known as poets of the Great War: Siegfried Sassoon, who introduced him to the idea of the “protest poem”, and Robert Graves, whom Owen described as “a big, rather plain fellow”. Like Milton, Owen was keen that his poetry should not merely be a passive witness to events, but rather an active response to the suffering he had seen and endured.
While his poetry came to symbolise the obscene carnage of the conflict, he nevertheless fought his own war in the trenches with great courage. He had enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles in October 1915, training at Hare Hall Camp in Essex. The next June he was commissioned into the Manchester Regiment and, in January 1917, Second Lieutenant Wilfred Owen, 4756, was thrown into the fighting on the Western Front.
Whatever his inner feelings, Owen was a bearer of the king’s commission and had to ensure that his men maintained order. Inspection tells of a wounded soldier whose dress does not come up to standard:
“You! What d’you mean by this?” I rapped.
“You dare come on parade like this?”
“Please, sir, it’s—” “’Old yer mouth,” the sergeant snapped.
“I takes ’is name, sir?” — “Please, and then dismiss.”
“You dare come on parade like this?”
“Please, sir, it’s—” “’Old yer mouth,” the sergeant snapped.
“I takes ’is name, sir?” — “Please, and then dismiss.”
In the same poem the narrator later learns that the “dirt” on the man’s uniform is blood and the man tells him bitterly: “But when we’re duly white-washed, being dead,/ The race will bear Field Marshal God’s inspection.”
On one occasion Owen and the 25 men under his command occupied an abandoned German dugout, with water almost to their waists. Here they spent two terrifying days under bombardment in the middle of no man’s land, in full view of the enemy. That experience inspired The Sentry, which describes how shells “hammered on top, but never quite burst through./ Rain, guttering down in waterfalls of slime”, the putrid smell of previous occupants “Who’d lived there years, and left their curse in the den,/ If not their corpses . . .”, and the misery of his men: “Those other wretches, how they bled and spewed.”
Elsewhere in this poem, originally called The Blind, Owen uses a candle to allay a sentry’s fears that he has lost his sight in the bombardment:
Coaxing, I held a flame against his lids
And said if he could see the least blurred light
He was not blind in time he’d get all right
“I can’t,” he sobbed. Eyeballs, huge-bulged like squids.
And said if he could see the least blurred light
He was not blind in time he’d get all right
“I can’t,” he sobbed. Eyeballs, huge-bulged like squids.
The site of this squalid dugout, which Owen described in a letter to his mother as “seventh hell”, was uncovered for a BBC documentary in 2004. “What we found was amazing; trenches complete with ammunition, duckboards and personal possessions belonging to fallen soldiers,” reported Andrew Robertshaw, the head of education at the National Army Museum, who organised the dig. The team also uncovered the skeleton of a German soldier, with his comb and manicure set. He was later identified as Jakob Hones, 34, a former farmhand from 7 Kompanie of 121 Reserve Regiment.
Owen had been in the trenches for several months when he was blown into the air by an exploding shell while sleeping, suffering concussion. Soon afterwards he was trapped in a hole for several days with the dismembered body of an officer he had known. A breakdown was imminent. According to Dominic Hibberd (obituary, September 19, 2012), one of his biographers, Owen was trembling on parade a few days later when he was accused by Major Dempster, a senior officer, of cowardice.
“I suspect it was the equivalent of a slap in the face that precipitated everything else that had been piling up for weeks,” Hibberd told The Sunday Times in 2002. It tipped Owen over the edge and he was evacuated to Britain, ending up in Craiglockhart War Hospital, which was dubbed Dottyville by Sassoon, who arrived six weeks later. Between 1916 and 1919 about 1,800 soldiers were treated there.
Here Owen edited The Hydra, the hospital’s journal. The magazine, which had a print run of no more than 200, offered a form of escape, with its reports on croquet, hedge-cutting and clubs including billiards and gardening. On July 7, 1917, according to the poultry-keeping club, “the chickens have made very great progress during the past fortnight, and are now looking wonderfully strong; otherwise, there is very little, if anything to report”. Owen’s poems Song of Songs and The Next War appeared anonymously in the journal, as did works by Sassoon.
After his discharge Owen spent the winter of 1917-18 convalescing at Scarborough, North Yorkshire, and in March 1918 he was posted to Ripon, where he continued to write and revise his poetry. On New Year’s Eve 1917 he had proudly told his mother, “I am a poet’s poet”, speaking, according to Jon Stallworthy (obituary, November 26, 2014), another biographer, “more truly than he knew”.
To Sassoon’s dismay, Owen returned to the front line in France in the summer of 1918 and on October 1 he led an attack on the village of Joncourt, on the Beaurevoir-Fonsomme line, taking out a German machinegun. He was awarded the Military Cross “for conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty”.
At about that time he wrote to his mother: “My nerves are in perfect order. I came out again in order to help these boys; directly, by leading them as well as an officer can; indirectly, by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them as well as a pleader can.” On another occasion he described how the buttercups had stained his men’s feet yellow, or “blessed with gold their slow boots”.
Yet Owen’s luck ran out. On November 4, a week before the armistice, he was killed by machinegun fire while leading his men during an attempt to cross the Sambre-Oise Canal. The next day he was promoted to lieutenant.
His mother received news of his death a week later, on the day the war ended. True to her son’s strict instructions, she immediately burnt many of his papers. Speaking in 2002, Peter Owen, his nephew, said: “As the bells celebrating the armistice were ringing in Shrewsbury, the postman arrived to give his parents the telegram.”
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born at Plas Wilmot, his maternal grandfather’s beautiful and spacious home in Oswestry, Shropshire, in 1893. He was the eldest of the four children of Thomas Owen, a former seaman who at the age of 18 had worked his way to India on the SS Benalder, and his somewhat hypochondriac wife, Susan (née Shaw). She was a devout Christian whose evangelical fervour was not wholly shared by her husband.
Wilfred had two brothers and a sister: Harold, with whom he once watched a striptease show at a fairground; Colin, who emigrated to Kenya in 1945 to set up the probation service there, and whose son Peter became involved in the Owen legacy; and Mary, who cared for her parents until their deaths, and who never married.
The influence of his mother is never far away in Owen’s work. Likewise, his interest in religion is often just below the surface. Anthem for Doomed Youth describes a funeral held on the battlefield rather than in a church, opening with the line: “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?/ — Only the monstrous anger of the guns.”Another poem, At a Calvary near the Ancre, a tributary of the Somme, links the sacrifice on the battlefield with the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross and other New Testament references:
The scribes on all the people shove
And bawl allegiance to the state,
But they who love the greater love
Lay down their life; they do not hate.
And bawl allegiance to the state,
But they who love the greater love
Lay down their life; they do not hate.
Wilfred was brought up in Birkenhead and Shrewsbury, the family moving around with Thomas’s dispiriting work as a clerk and later a station master with a railway company. He was educated at Birkenhead Institute and Shrewsbury Technical School. As a boy he enjoyed swimming in mountain pools, reading Oscar Wilde and wearing a favourite green suit. Before joining the army he had floppy hair.
Already he was writing poetry, taking inspiration from the work of John Keats, whose house at Teignmouth he visited in 1911 while on holiday with an aunt and uncle in nearby Torquay. He marked the occasion with a sonnet. According to Stallworthy, “Owen warmed to the sensuality and musicality of the older poet, and Keats’s physicality (heightened by his study of anatomy and experience of illness) accorded with his apprentice’s own precocious awareness of the human body.”
His earliest extant poem, To Poesy (1909-10), is in the manner of Keats and invokes the goddess Poetry’s celestial power, while Uriconium: An Ode (1913) takes its name from the Roman city at Wroxeter, east of Shrewsbury. Between writing these he worked as a pupil-teacher at the Wyle Cop School and then as a lay assistant to the Rev Herbert Wigan, the vicar of Dunsden in Oxfordshire. There he came across the poems of Shelley, devouring them on isolated evenings in his cold, damp room in the vicarage. His mother had ambitions that her son would take holy orders, but Owen had little interest in theology and Wigan had little interest in literature; soon they were quarrelling and Owen, a slight man who stood only 5ft 5in tall, succumbed to a bronchial infection.
He attended botany classes at University College, Reading, but then failed the scholarship exam for full-time studies. At his doctor’s suggestion he travelled to France in the summer of 1913, teaching English at the Berlitz school in Bordeaux for a year and then tutoring two young boys. According to Stallworthy, “he grew to love France, its language and its literature”. By some accounts he downplayed his lower middle-class background, convincing his hosts that he was descended from the aristocracy, as was the case in the folklore of his family. He has also been accused of enjoying an unhealthy interest in young men while in France, writing home of “altar boys, boys in the park and boys in the YMCA”.
According to Nigel Jones, a historian of the First World War, Owen at first welcomed the war, writing to his mother that he thought it would “effect a little useful weeding” of Europe’s multiplying lower orders. Yet elsewhere in the same letter he declared: “I am furious with chagrin to think that the Minds which were to have excelled the civilisation of ten thousand years, are being annihilated — and bodies, the product of aeons of Natural Selection, melted down to pay for political statues.”
For a year he deliberated over whether to risk the “melting down” of his own body, and if so whether to join the French army, the Italian cavalry (“for reasons both aesthetic and poetical”) or the British forces. A visit to a French hospital for the wounded in September 1915, where he made graphic sketches of bullet-damaged limbs, persuaded him to sign up at home.
Owen was one of 979,498 soldiers from Britain and the Empire to die in a conflict that left many more maimed, and directly and indirectly cost the lives of millions. His gravestone, small and simple, like those of 56 other British soldiers who died the same day, lies a few hundred yards from where he fell. It is third from the left on the back row in the war cemetery in the village of Ors.
Today the sound of explosions has been replaced by the hum of a motorway, while buttercups have been superseded by oil-seed rape and other crops. Yet a century on the farmers of Picardy, in northeastern France, continue to uncover ammunition, personal effects and unclaimed body parts that have lain beneath the surface of their fields undisturbed.
The first edition of Owen’s poetry appeared in 1920 edited by Sassoon, whose influence, along with the patronage of Edith Sitwell, propelled his work into the public eye. Writing in the introduction, Sassoon insisted that the reader would find everything there was to be said about Owen contained within the poetry. “Any superficial impressions of his personality, any records of his conversation, behaviour or appearance, would be irrelevant and unseemly,” he added, as if to caution future generations against biographies of the poet. “The curiosity which demands such morsels would be incapable of appreciating the richness of his work.”
A fuller edition appeared in 1931 edited by Edmund Blunden, who three years later announced in The Times that, “thanks to the generosity of the poet’s mother and the Friends of the National Libraries, the British Museum has just acquired what appears to be practically the whole surviving manuscript of Owen’s verse”. Stallworthy claimed that Blunden’s edition was influential “in that it was this edition that was read, marked, learnt and inwardly digested by the next generation of poets”. He pointed in particular to WH Auden’s The Orators (1932), which references Owen’s lines “The poetry is in the pity” and “My nerves are in perfect order”. Nevertheless, WB Yeats excluded Owen from his Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), claiming that “passive suffering is not a theme for poetry”.
Although Owen’s writing became known to the wider public between the wars, not least when the composer Arthur Bliss included Spring Offensive and works of other poets in his choral symphony Morning Heroes, his legacy truly began to gain momentum after the Second World War. In April 1950 a memorial plaque was unveiled in Oswestry; in 1959 Ted Hughes’s poem Wilfred Owen’s Photographs appeared in The Spectator; and in the 1960s Benjamin Britten interspersed Owen’s poetry with lines from the Requiem Mass in his pacifist War Requiem.
In 1963 Owen’s younger brother, Harold, published the first volume of Journey from Obscurity, recalling at leisure and in depth memories of his family. Two more volumes followed in successive years, with the second winning the Royal Society of Literature’s WH Heinemann award. After Harold’s death in 1971 many previously unknown papers came to light suggesting that he had hidden Owen’s attempts to mask his origins, his gradual religious disillusionment and any discussion of his sexuality. By then Owen’s poetry was on the school curriculum, studied by some as a cautionary tale against the futility of war and by others as a tribute to those who had perished in the Great War.
Stallworthy’s biography, published in 1974, did much to re-energise the Owen legacy and is seen by some as the definitive guide to his life, although critics detected the ghost of his friend — and Owen’s brother — Harold in its contents. According to Jones, Stallworthy “pulled his punches accordingly, ignoring any idea that Owen’s tender feelings for his troops might have been influenced by a lover’s rather than a poet’s passions”.
That said, little thought was given to the unmarried Owen’s personal life until 1987 when The New Statesman published an article by Jonathan Cutbill entitled The Truth Untold, which came from a line in Owen’s poem Strange Meeting; it is about an encounter between the narrator and an enemy soldier he killed the previous day. Cutbill claimed that for 70 years Owen’s experiences as a homosexual poet had been suppressed, while Hibberd’s biography, published in 2002, declared that the poet was not only homosexual, but was an enthusiastically practising “out” one into the bargain. Guy Cuthbertson’s 2014 biography equivocates on the subject.
Some have found evidence for Owen’s homosexuality in Shadwell Stair, one of his non-war poems, pointing out that Shadwell stair was a cruising spot in the early 20th century. A stanza he withdrew reads:
And I have lips that are fresh o’night,
And ways like the river mists, and hands
Like the gradual tide upon the sands,
To feel and follow a man’s delight.
And ways like the river mists, and hands
Like the gradual tide upon the sands,
To feel and follow a man’s delight.
He was not the only war poet and he was certainly not the most prolific. While the romance of his early death, especially in a conflict that he clearly considered so futile, may have some appeal, Rupert Brooke, Ivor Gurney, Graves and others, including, of course, Sassoon, all deserve their place in the pantheon of war poets.
Perhaps it is the brevity of Owen’s lines and the spare horror of his verse that draws the reader so strongly. In Dulce et Decorum est, Owen described better than anyone the brutality of 20th-century warfare, with lines such as “Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling/ Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time”. He ended by expressing his fury not only at the pointlessness of war, but at the propagandists’ insistence that it is sweet to die for one’s country:
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Wilfred Owen, MC, soldier and war poet, was born on March 18, 1893. He was killed in action on November 4, 1918, aged 25
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