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Wilfred Owen. (1893 - 1918)
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Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born in Oswestry on March 18, 1893, the eldest of four children. Despite Owen's longing to go to public school and Oxford, he was educated at Birkenhead Institute and then the Technical School in Shrewsbury, owing to his family's lack of money to pay for a public school education. By the time he left school Owen was writing verse and dreaming of becoming a poet. At this time he was going through a period of devotion to Keats, although he thought Shelley a greater genius, and was also influenced by other nineteenth-century writers. Owen was also influenced by Ruskin's remark that a poet should know about the world as a whole; plants and stones, as well as people, which is reflected in Owen's interest in botany, geology and astronomy. He shared with his mother a simple evangelical faith, and developed a sense of mission which eventually found expression in his preaching against the war.
Since University fees were out of the question Owen had to try for a scholarship. After a brief period as a pupil-teacher in 1911, Owen became an unpaid assistant to the vicar of Dunsden, near Reading, in return for tuition. He found the "Silence, the State, and the Stiffness" of life in the vicarage hard, and poetry became increasingly valuable to him. His first cousin, Leslie Gunston, lived nearby and he became Owen's literary confidant and his closest friend until 1917. They took to writing poems in competition with each other.
A village revival at the end of 1912 forced the lay assistant to take his first step towards his own freedom, and after much inner torment Owen told the vicar that Christianity was inconsistent with science and poetry, and left Dunsden. He arrived home in a state of collapse, suffering from severe nightmares, precursors of his war dreams. His mother nursed him back to health, and in the summer he took a scholarship, which he failed.
In September 1913 Owen went to Bordeaux as an English teacher. By the time the First World War broke out in August 1914 he was living with a family in the Pyrenees. Fit and brown he met and enchanted a famous poet, Laurent Tailhade, an old decadent and anarchist. Owen's reactions to the war were those of an Aesthete and lover of France, and he made no attempt to return home. He began to read French literature and to experiment with poetry in the style of Tailhade. He returned briefly to England in May 1915, where recruiting propaganda in London stirred his conscience and he began to think of enlisting. The few poems he wrote about the war before 1917 show little evidence of his later convictions. Owen would have had difficulty obtaining a commission were it not for the fact that the Army regarded time spent abroad as some compensation for a lack of a gentlemanly education. He therefore gave up his tutoring in the autumn and decided to enlist as a cadet in the Artists' Rifles.
His training began in Bloomsbury, and by June 1916 he was judged fit to join the Territorials. Owen was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the 5th Battalion, Manchester Regiment, and spent the rest of the year training in England. On December 30 he was sent out to the base camp at Etaples. He was then posted to the 2nd Manchesters, who were in the line near Beaumont Hamel. His experiences at Beaumont Hamel, and then later at St Quentin left him in a state of neurasthenia or "shell-shock", and Owen was sent back to Cerisy and then to a hospital at Etretat. At Etretat it was decided that the best place for him would be Craiglockhart War Hospital, and after a brief period in England he was sent to Edinburgh on June 25, and he soon began his "treatment" with his doctor, Arthur Brock.
After a month at Craiglockhart Owen was ready to take on new work but it wasn't until the arrival of Siegfried Sassoon that he discovered what the work was to be. Sassoon was admitted on July 23, and Owen having read the report of Sassoon's protest in The Times and bought a copy of The Old Huntsman and other Poems, was intensely moved. It wasn't until August 16 however, that Owen screwed up his courage enough to go and introduce himself to Sassoon. He found Sassoon sitting on his bed, cleaning his golf clubs, the sun blazing on his purple dressing gown. Standing nervously beside Sassoon Owen produced several copies of The Old Huntsman and asked Sassoon to sign them. Owen called again a few days later and then wrote a poem in the Sassoon-style, The Dead-Beat. Sassoon believed in plain, contemporary language, truth to experience and writing from the heart, things which are all evident in The Dead-Beat.
Owen took Sassoon copies of much of his poetry. At first Sassoon was uninterested, being miserably unhappy, both at being at Craiglockhart and at the death of a close friend. However, Owen persevered and by early September the two were beginning to be friends. Both were busy with new poems (Sassoon's were later to form much of his Counter-Attack and Other Poems collection). Their conversations were to provide the framework for much of what Owen wrote that autumn. They discussed the nature of the war, although not its horrors, and Sassoon lent Owen Henri Barbusse's Under Fire and other books which argued that continuing the war was not necessarily right.
Between August and October Owen drafted over a dozen poems. The first for which Sassoon expressed heartfelt interest was Anthem for Doomed Youth, written in September. He made a few amendments, mainly to eliminate the nationalistic implications from the poem, and then tried to get it published. Before his discharge on October 30, Owen was introduced to Robert Graves, who was visiting Sassoon. Graves considered some of Owen's poems too "Sassoonish", but he was quicker than Sassoon had been to see Owen's potential as a poet. Sassoon and Owen had a final dinner in Edinburgh on November 3, before Owen departed with Robert Ross's address in his pocket.
Owen had three weeks leave after he was discharged from Craiglockhart. He arrived in London on November 8, and had lunch with Ross on November 9, at which he was introduced to both Arnold Bennet and H. G. Wells. He met a few other famous people in London before he was required to rejoin the Manchesters in Scarborough. From Scarborough, Owen moved to Ripon for training, before returning to Scarborough as fit for general duties.
On August 31, 1918 Owen arrived back in France, and eventually moved up to the Hindenburg line in September, which he helped to clear and was recommended for the Military Cross as a result. Then in October his Battalion was sent to help in crossing the Sambre Canal and on November 4, 1918 the Battle of the Sambre Canal began. The aim was for the British troops to cross the canal and take over German occupied land on the far side, thus advancing the British Front Line. The engineers had built rafts and bridges to enable the Manchesters and others to cross the canal, but the artillery barrage laid day before hand failed to do enough damage to the German troops on the opposite bank. The Germans, therefore, counter-attacked and a great many men were wounded or killed in the attempt, including second lieutenant Wilfred Owen.
© Michèle Fry, 1998.
The classic biography of Owen is by John Stallworthy (Oxford University Press, 1974, reissued 1998). You can buy it from Amazon. Alternatively there is a biography of Owen by Merryn Williams (Seren Books, 1993) also available to buy from Amazon. A discussion of Owen's poetry can be found in John Purkis' A Preface to Wilfred Owen (Addison Wesley Longman, 1999) available from Amazon UK, also available is Selected Letters of Wilfred Owen edited by John Bell (Oxford Paperback, 1998).
For those travelling to the Western Front, Helen McPhail & Philip Guest have produced Wilfred Owen: Poet's Trail (Pen & Sword, 1998) available from Amazon UK.
For material on and by Owen I can recommend Oxford University's Wilfred Owen Multimedia Digital Archive WOMDA - it is an excellent use of computer technology !)
http://www.sassoonery.demon.co.uk/owen.htm
Wilfred Owen