Owen, Wilfred Edward Salter

(1893-1918)

   He was born in Plas Wilmot, near Oswestry, Shropshire, the son of a railway clerk, but brought up in Birkenhead and educated at Shrewsbury Technical School until 1911. From 1911 to 1913 he was pupil and lay assistant to the Rev. Herbert Wigan, the vicar of Dunsden, near Reading. Appalled by the discrepancy between the Church and the poverty all around him, he left to become a teacher of English at the Berlitz school in Bordeaux, where he remained until 1915. He enlisted in September 1915, and in May 1917 he was diagnosed with neurasthenia (chronic mental fatigue) and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital, Slateford, near Edinburgh, to recuperate. It was here that he met Siegfried Sassoon (see entry), who influenced his poetry. He returned to the front and was killed in action one week before the armistice and was awarded the Military Cross. He is memorialized by a stone in Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey along with other poets of the First World War. Some of his poems: "Greater Love," "He Died Smiling," "Soldier's Dream," "The Next War," "The Sentry," "Wild with All Regrets," "Winter Song."

   Sources: Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite DVD, 2006. Peace and War: A Collection of Poems. Michael Harrison, and Christopher Stuart-Clark, ed. Oxford University Press, 1989. The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. C. Day Lewis, ed. New Directions, 1963. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Faber Book of War Poetry. Kenneth Baker, ed. Faber and Faber, 1996. The Mentor Book of Major British Poets. Oscar Williams, ed. New American Library, 1963. The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry. Jon Silkin, ed. Penguin Books, 1979. Westminster Abbey Official Guide (no date).