Wilfred Owen was an English poet and soldier. He was born on March 18, 1893, in Oswestry, Shropshire, is one of the most poignant voices of World War I. His poetry, characterized by its stark and haunting depictions of the war’s brutality, has immortalized him as a significant figure in English literature.
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born to Thomas and Susan Owen. His family experienced financial difficulties. Wilfred Owen was always thoughtful and imaginative. He attended the Birkenhead Institute and later the Shrewsbury Technical School. Before passing the Matriculation Examination at London University, he spent two years in France. Inspired by Romantic poets like John Keats, Owen began writing poetry in his teens.
In 1912, he went to France for the second time to recover his health. With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, he returned to England and enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles. In 1917, he was sent to the war front in France as an Infantry Officer. At that front, he experienced the horrors of trench warfare firsthand. He was seriously wounded and was admitted to the Military Hospital. After his discharge from the hospital, he visited London. During this time, he became intimately acquainted with Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, and Osbert Sitwell, some of the literary figures of the younger generation. His poems began to be published in different magazines, and he was gradually recognized as one of the foremost war poets of his time.
Again, Wilfred Owen went back to the battlefield in France by the middle of 1918. In this year, he won the Military Cross. But he was killed only a week before the Armistice on November 4, 1918. The life of a genius poet came to an end at the age of twenty-five.
There are two editions of his poems, one with an introduction by Siegfried Sassoon, published in 1920, and the other with a memoir by Edmund Blunden, published in 1931.
Wilfred Owen is a soldier-poet. He sings of disillusionment, pathos, and the tragedy of war. The emotions experienced by him in active warfare are finely expressed in his poems. Owen has no illusions about the glory and greatness of war. He is noted for his metrical experiments. Not satisfied with the traditional and stereotyped language of poetry, he tries to invent a new style of expression to convey the horrors of war. He popularized what has come to be known as para-rhyme or half-rhyme. He is one of the principal ancestors of the young poets of that generation, particularly of the school represented by Eliot, Auden, Spender, etc.
List of 1000+ Essay Writing Topics and Ideas
The MSS of his poems, which were mainly a passionate protest against the horrors of war and which showed the influence of Keats on him, was presented to the British Museum in 1934.
The poetry that springs from the direct experience at the war front is known as war poetry. The war poets are a group apart, a pathetic one. Their poems were mainly lyrical. Some of them, like Rupert Brooke, sang the joy of war and the sacrifices made for one’s fatherland. They drew their inspiration from patriotism. On the other hand, poets like Sassoon sang not of the joy of war, but the horror and pity of war. To them, war was nothing but an “ugly dirty business.” Wilfred Owen is one of them. He was endowed with a truly poetic imagination and had a keen, sensitive mind. An angry pity is the dominant tone of the bulk of his poems. He gives a view of war that is exactly the opposite of Brooke’s. Owen neither glorifies the death of the soldier at the war front nor does he express any enthusiasm for war.
The main themes of his poems were suffering, bitterness, impassioned realism, and vengeful irony. To him, war is a colossal waste of human life and opportunity. There is nothing great or sublime in war. Only men utterly callous and insensible to nobler feelings and sentiments can glorify war and idealize it. This spirit of moral rebellion is the chief note of what is known as the war poetry of Owen. An unforgettable spiritual drama remains alive at the heart of his war poems.
Of all the war poets, Owen gives the best expression of the inspired pity and anger felt at the sight of the ghastly dance of death in civilized warfare. None of the war poets rivals Owen in the strong and genuine feeling of disgust and hatred for war. He always sings of the disillusionment and horror of war.