Abstract
Wilfred Owen was born in Oswestry in Shropshire, where his father was a railway worker, and educated at Shrewsbury Technical College. His pre-war verses, influenced by Keats, are undistinguished. He served as an officer in France from 1915. Siegfried Sassoon, whom he met in hospital in Edinburgh, encouraged him to persevere with poems in which he sought to express ‘the pity of war’. Owen returned to France in 1918, won the MC, and was killed, a few days before the Armistice, on the Sambre Canal. Sassoon brought out Owen’s Collected Poems in 1920. There have been revised editions by Edmund Blunden (1931) and C. Day-Lewis (1963). Benjamin Britten set some of the poems to music in his War Requiem of 1962.
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© 1989 Macmillan Publishers Limited
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McEwan, N. (1989). Wilfred Owen 1893–1918. In: McEwan, N. (eds) The Twentieth Century (1900–present). Macmillan Anthologies of English Literature. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20151-8_35
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20151-8_35
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-46477-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-20151-8
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