Wilfred Owen is known as one of the great anti-war poets. His experiences in the First World War informed his vivid, urgent and fiercely unsentimental verses, which remain some of the most widely recognised in the English language.
Owen wrote nearly all of his poetry in the space of just one year – from August 1917 up until his death in November 1918. Prior to the war Owen had read Keats and Shelley, Yeats and Housman but he had written only a few verses himself.
He started focusing on war poetry at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, where he had been sent to recover from shell shock, following his experiences on the front line in France. It was here that Owen became friends with fellow patient, the prominent and successful poet Siegfried Sassoon, who recognised his poetic abilities, encouraged him to write and helped by editing – and later publishing – his poetry.
While Sassoon was known for his caustic, satirical attacks on the incompetence of senior military command, Owen’s poetry displayed a greater emotional sensitivity. In poems such as ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ and ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, he evoked the terrifying horrors of war through vivid imagery and attacked the lazy glorification of war by those who never had to experience it.
In September 1918, Owen returned to the front line where he won the Military Cross before being killed in action a week before the war's end, aged 25.
Only five of his poems were published during his lifetime; others were published in anthologies and collections from 1919 onwards.
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