Owen, Wilfred (1893–1918)

One of the most powerful anti-war poets of the 20th century, Wilfred Owen was born in Oswestry, North Shropshire, close to the Welsh border in England. He worked briefly for the Anglican Church in Dunsden, Oxfordshire, but the appalling rural poverty he encountered provoked an emotional breakdown that sent him home. He next went to France, where from 1913 to 1915 he taught English and also met the French poet Laurent Tailhade. After the outbreak of World War I, Owen enlisted in the Manchester regiment and went to the front. He was injured in the spring of 1917 and admitted to the Craiglockhart war hospital in Scotland with shell shock. Owen was declared fit for service in the summer of 1918 and returned to fight on the front lines in France. He was killed in action on the banks of the Sambre-Oise canal on November 4, 1918, seven days before armistice was declared. Poet Siegfried Sassoon wrote the introduction for the first published collection of his poetry in 1920.

While hospitalized, Owen befriended Sassoon, and they developed an intense and productive relationship, one that is beautifully rendered by Pat Barker in her novel Regeneration. At this time Owen wrote two of his most celebrated protests against the harrowing reality of war: Dulce et Decorum Est and Anthem for Doomed Youth. The first of these begins with a description of soldiers in the trenches, likened to beggars and hags as they struggle through the mud, and then depicts the horror and panic of a gas attack with shocking, graphic clarity.

One of the men does not reach his gas mask in time, and Owen describes his death, using visceral and haunting metaphors and similes to convey the dreadfulness of the scene. The poem dismantles the patriotic ideology that justifies imperialist war, assuring the reader that if they too could see and hear these sights, they would reject the high-sounding rhetoric epitomized by the Latin motto, “Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori,” which translates as “what a sweet and meet thing it is to die for one's country.”

Anthem for Doomed Youth also interrogates warmongering platitudes, asking the reader how these war dead will be remembered, and answering that only the brutality of the battlefield and the grief of the bereaved will recognize the war dead, as the usual conventions of church ritual have become mockeries in the face of the slaughter of an entire generation of young men. The poem exemplifies Owen's characteristic stylistic techniques: onomatopoeia, in which the sound of the words mimics what is being described, often the noise of rifle fire and bombs; alliteration, the sequential repetition of the same consonant sounds, often at the beginning of words; assonance, the repetition of vowel sounds; and para-rhyme, or half rhyme, in which words contain similar but not exact sounds. These qualities help to recreate the sensory experience of life in the trenches.

Searching to give expression to the unspeakable horrors of the war, Owen, like many World War I poets, radically innovated poetic conventions. Challenging the reigning Georgian notion that contemporary war was not a fit subject for poetry, they pushed the boundaries of style and content in ways that anticipated and influenced the Modernist literary revolution. In the process, they drew on and reworked poetic [Page 1073]tradition. The influence of the romantic poet John Keats is particularly evident in Owen's work, in sound patterns, rhythms, and direct allusion. This can be seen in Anthem for Doomed Youth, where words from Keats's ode To Autumn describing a bucolic scene are woven into a description of shells falling and exploding. In the process, Owen shatters the romantic pastoral ideal, much as the war itself shattered people's lives.

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