Wilfred Edward Salter Owen MC was an English poet and soldier.
44 Facts About Wilfred Owen
2.
Wilfred Owen was one of the leading poets of the First World War.
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Wilfred Owen was born on 18 March 1893 at Plas Wilmot, a house in Weston Lane, near Oswestry in Shropshire.
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When Wilfred Owen was born, his parents lived in a comfortable house owned by his grandfather, Edward Shaw.
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Thomas Wilfred Owen transferred back to Birkenhead in 1898 when he became stationmaster at Woodside station.
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Wilfred Owen was educated at the Birkenhead Institute and at Shrewsbury Technical School.
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Wilfred Owen discovered his poetic vocation in about 1904 during a holiday spent in Cheshire.
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Wilfred Owen was raised as an Anglican of the evangelical type, and in his youth was a devout believer, in part thanks to his strong relationship with his mother, which lasted throughout his life.
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In return for free lodging, and some tuition for the entrance exam Wilfred Owen worked as lay assistant to the Vicar of Dunsden near Reading, living in the vicarage from September 1911 to February 1913.
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Wilfred Owen's time spent at Dunsden parish led him to disillusionment with the Church, both in its ceremony and its failure to provide aid for those in need.
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Wilfred Owen fell into a shell hole and suffered concussion; he was caught in the blast of a trench mortar shell and spent several days unconscious on an embankment lying amongst the remains of one of his fellow officers.
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Wilfred Owen spent a contented and fruitful winter in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, and in March 1918 was posted to the Northern Command Depot at Ripon.
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Wilfred Owen returned in July 1918, to active service in France, although he might have stayed on home-duty indefinitely.
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Wilfred Owen saw it as his duty to add his voice to that of Sassoon, that the horrific realities of the war might continue to be told.
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Sassoon was violently opposed to the idea of Wilfred Owen returning to the trenches, threatening to "stab [him] in the leg" if he tried it.
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Aware of his attitude, Wilfred Owen did not inform him of his action until he was in France.
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On 1 October 1918, Wilfred Owen led units of the Second Manchesters to storm a number of enemy strong points near the village of Joncourt.
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Wilfred Owen personally manipulated a captured enemy machine gun from an isolated position and inflicted considerable losses on the enemy.
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Wilfred Owen's mother received the telegram informing her of his death on Armistice Day, as the church bells in Shrewsbury were ringing out in celebration.
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Wilfred Owen is buried at Ors Communal Cemetery, Ors, in northern France.
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Wilfred Owen is regarded by many as the greatest poet of the First World War, known for his verse about the horrors of trench and gas warfare.
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Wilfred Owen had been writing poetry for some years before the war, himself dating his poetic beginnings to a stay at Broxton by the Hill when he was ten years old.
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Wilfred Owen was one of the first to experiment with it extensively.
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Sassoon's use of satire influenced Wilfred Owen, who tried his hand at writing "in Sassoon's style".
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Further, the content of Wilfred Owen's verse was undeniably changed by his work with Sassoon.
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Sassoon's emphasis on realism and "writing from experience" was contrary to Wilfred Owen's hitherto romantic-influenced style, as seen in his earlier sonnets.
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Wilfred Owen was to take both Sassoon's gritty realism and his own romantic notions and create a poetic synthesis that was both potent and sympathetic, as summarised by his famous phrase "the pity of war".
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Wilfred Owen's poems had the benefit of strong patronage, and it was a combination of Sassoon's influence, support from Edith Sitwell, and the preparation of a new and fuller edition of the poems in 1931 by Edmund Blunden that ensured his popularity, coupled with a revival of interest in his poetry in the 1960s which plucked him out of a relatively exclusive readership into the public eye.
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Graphic details of the horror Wilfred Owen witnessed were never spared.
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Only five of Wilfred Owen's poems were published before his death, one in fragmentary form.
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However, most of them were published posthumously: Poems, The Poems of Wilfred Owen, The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, The Complete Poems and Fragments ; fundamental in this last collection is the poem Soldier's Dream, that deals with Owen's conception of war.
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Wilfred Owen held Siegfried Sassoon in an esteem not far from hero-worship, remarking to his mother that he was "not worthy to light [Sassoon's] pipe".
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Wilfred Owen was stationed on home-duty in Scarborough for several months, during which time he associated with members of the artistic circle into which Sassoon had introduced him, which included Robbie Ross and Robert Graves.
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About three weeks later, Wilfred Owen wrote to bid Sassoon farewell, as he was on the way back to France, and they continued to communicate.
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However, in his own account of his friendship with Wilfred Owen, which appeared in his 1945 autobiography, Siegfried's Journey, Sassoon conjures up a clear picture of Wilfred Owen's personality, and writes with great tenderness of the time they spent together.
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An important turning point in Wilfred Owen scholarship occurred in 1987 when the New Statesman published "The Truth Untold" by Jonathan Cutbill, the literary executor of Edward Carpenter, which attacked the academic suppression of Wilfred Owen as a poet of homosexual experience.
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On 11 November 1985, Wilfred Owen was one of the 16 Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner.
38.
The forester's house in Ors where Wilfred Owen spent his last night, Maison forestiere de l'Ermitage, has been transformed by Turner Prize nominee Simon Patterson into an art installation and permanent memorial to Wilfred Owen and his poetry, which opened to the public on 1 October 2011.
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Peter Owen, Wilfred Owen's nephew, was President of the Association until his death in July 2018.
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Pat Barker's historical novel, Regeneration, describes the meeting and relationship between Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, acknowledging that, from Sassoon's perspective, the meeting had a profoundly significant effect on Wilfred Owen.
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Wilfred Owen's death is described in the third book of Barker's Regeneration trilogy, The Ghost Road.
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Wilfred Owen was mentioned as a source of inspiration for one of the correspondents in the epistolary novel, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.
43.
Wilfred Owen, portrayed by Matthew Tennyson, and his friendship with Siegfried Sassoon, are depicted in Benediction, a 2021 biographical-drama film, directed by Terence Davies.
44.
Wilfred Owen's poetry is sampled multiple times on the 2000 Jedi Mind Tricks album Violent by Design.