Wilfred Owen

Abstract

Wilfred Owen was born, on 18 March 1893, into a background one constituent of which was the Evangelical wing of the Church of England. The eldest of four children, he entered the Birkenhead Institute on 11 June 1901. In October 1911 he matriculated at London University, and from later that month until the early spring of 1913 he was the pupil and lay assistant of the Reverend Herbert Wigan at Dunsden Vicarage, Oxfordshire. Some prior indication of that alert conscience in his war poetry emerges in this period, through his prolonged contact with others’ suffering in a society he could exert little influence over, and which produced in him that peacetime equivalent of pity and indignation, the two principal impulses in his war poetry:

a gentle little girl of five, fast sinking under Consumption—contracted after chickenpox. Isn’t it pitiable…. the Father is perennially out of work, and the Mother I fancy half-starving for the sake of four children. This, I suppose is only a typical case; one of many Cases! O hard word! How it savours of rigid, frigid professionalism! How it suggests smooth and polished, formal, labelled, mechanical callousness!¹

The poetry of modern warfare may be in the pity, but neither pity nor self-pity in themselves can inspire great poetry.

John H. Johnston: English Poetry of the First World War

See the great bards of elder time, who quelled

The passions which they sung, as by their strain

May well be known: their living melody

Tempers its own contagion to the vein

Of those who are infected with it—I

Have suffered what I wrote, or viler pain!

And so my words have seeds of misery—

Shelley: The Triumph of Life