Wilfred owen

Ors Communal Cemetery: Wilfred Owen tombstone

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen (18 March 1893 in Oswestry, Shropshire - 4 November 1918 in Ors) was a British soldier and poet. His mentor, Siegfried Sassoon, was a clear influence in his shocking and stark poetry about the horrors of World War I, which contrasted with the general perception of it. His best-known works include "Anthem for Doomed Youth", "Dulce Et Decorum Est", "Insensibility", "Strange Meeting", & #34;Futility" and "The Parable of the old man and the young".

Early Years

He was the eldest of four children and came from a family of English and Welsh ancestry. At that time he lived with his parents, Thomas and Harriet Susan (Shaw) Owen, in a comfortable home owned by his grandfather. When he died, the family was forced to move to a country house located in the streets outside Birkenhead, a village in the Wirral district.

He was educated at Birkenhead Institute and at what is now known as Wakeman School, where he received a solid academic background. He left school in 1911, and entered the University of London albeit with no honors, his studies affected by the loss of his uncle and role model Edgar Hilton. In addition, he worked as a private tutor in France before the outbreak of the First World War.

Military service

In 1915 he entered the army, and a year later was commissioned as a second lieutenant (on trial) in the Manchester Regiment. He began the war years with a cheerful and optimistic character, but after two traumatic experiences, the course of his life changed forever. First, he was hit by a trench mortar that caused him to land on the remains of a comrade. Soon after, he was trapped for days in an old German trench. Due to these two events he was diagnosed as suffering from shell shock and was sent to Edinburgh's Craiglockhart War Hospital for treatment. There he met another poet, Siegfried Sassoon, who encouraged him and helped him with stylistic literary issues, completely transforming his life.

After a period of convalescence, Owen returned to regimental duties. In 1918, he was sent to Ripon where he composed several of his poems, including "Futility" and "Strange Meeting."

Homosexuality and relationship with Sassoon

Wilfred Owen always kept Siegfried Sassoon in a hero position. After his discharge from Craiglockhart, Owen associated with members of the art world into which he had been introduced by Sassoon, such as Robert Ross and Robert Graves. Andrew Motion wrote about Owen's relationship with Sassoon stating that the latter's homosexuality allowed Owen to possess an ideology and lifestyle that he would find naturally endearing.

Several incidents in Owen's life have led some to conclude that he was an undeclared homosexual and that Sassoon appealed to him not only as a more experienced poet, but also as a man. Such incidents were, on the one hand, the statements by Robert Graves and Sacheverell Sitwell (whom he also knew personally), who affirmed that he was homosexual, and on the other hand, homoeroticism as a central element in many of his poems. Through Sassoon, Owen was introduced to a sophisticated homosexual literary circle, which included Robert Ross (a friend of Oscar Wilde) and Osbert Sitwell, among others. These contacts increased his confidence in including homoerotic elements in his work.

Poetry

Pahts of gloryNevinson's "retired" picture of the exhibition in Leicester Galleries in 1918.

Owen is considered by historians to be the leading poet of World War I. His beginnings in the world of poetry came at the early age of ten. Romantic poets like Shelley or Keats were a great influence on his early work. However, his most famous poems (“Dulce et Decorum Est” and “Anthem for Doomed Youth”) arose from the profound influence of his friend and adviser Siegfried Sassoon; as a result, Owen's poetry became more acclaimed than his mentor's. His poetry changed radically in 1917, after leaving the hospital. As part of his therapy, Owen's doctor, Arthur Brock, encouraged him to translate his experiences, particularly his dream experiences, into his poems. This is how the pacifist "Dulce et decorum est" concludes:

Bend as old beggars under farts, / strutting on the knees and coughing like old, we cursed through the mud / to turn our backs on the condemned bengalas / and start dragging us to an unattainable rest. The men went asleep. Many already without boots / wore blood shoes. All pathetic, all blind, / drank by tiredness, deaf even to the whistles / of opposite obuses falling behind. Gas! Hurry up, guys! In a clumsy ecstasy / we dug up sapphire masks just in time; / but some kept asking for help screaming, stumbling / undecided, like a man burning in flames or lime alive. / Bored after the glass drenched from the mask, and through that thick green light, / as sunk in a green sea, I saw him drowning. / In all my dreams, before my undefense sight, / it flies over me, it chokes, drowns, it goes off. If in some suffocating dream you could also follow on foot / the wagon where we threw it / and see how it twisted the white eyes on his face, / a hanging face, like a sinful devil; / if you could hear, each tumbo, the blood foam that vomits the rotten lungs, / obscene as the cancer, bitter as pus / lying vile and incurable

Thousands of poems were published during the war but very few had the benefit of as strong a patronage as Owen's. And it is Sassoon's influence, among other things, that ensured his popularity, along with a revival of interest in his poetry in the 1960s, which came to concern a wider audience. Only five of his poems had been published before his death. Sassoon, along with Edith Sitwell, later helped to secure the publication of the entire collection.

Death

In July 1918, after a period of recuperation, Owen returned to active service in France, although he could have stayed home on duty indefinitely. This decision was made when Sassoon, who had been shot in the head by friendly fire, was forced to return to England for the remainder of the war. Owen saw it as his own duty to relieve Sassoon at the front so that he could continue telling the rest of the world the true horrors of war.

On November 4, 1918, ironically just a week before the end of the war, Owen was shot dead while crossing the Sambre-Oise canal. His mother received a telegram informing her of his death on Armistice Day. Wilfred Owen is currently buried in Ors Communal Cemetery and some of his poems were set to music by composer Benjamin Britten in his work War Requiem.