wilfred owen biography

Wilfred Owen - Biography

Tom Owen

Susan Shaw

Wilfred Mary Harold Colin

1893 1896 1898 1900

Benjamin Britten

Plas Wilmot

Birkenhead Institute

Shrewsbury Borough Technical School

William Wordsworth

John Keats

Vicarage - Dunsden

MonetaDespondency

Berlitz School 1913-14

Private tutor Summer 1914

Laurent Tailhade

English Romantics

French Decadents

Wilfred Owen

French Symbolist

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Artists’ Rifles - October 1915

Commission – June 19162nd Manchesters

Battalion

Company Company Company Company

Platoon PlatoonPlatoon Platoon

Section SectionSection Section

900 men

January – March 1917Spring Offensive

“I suppose I can endure cold and fatigue, and the face to face death as well as another; but extra for me there is the universal pervasion of ugliness. Hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language and nothing but foul, even from one’s own mouth (for all are devil-ridden), everything unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dug outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth. In poetry we call them the most glorious. But to sit with them all day, all night...and a week later to come back and find them still sitting there, in motionless groups, THAT is what saps soldierly spirit.”

Letter to Susan Owen 1917

March – April 1917The Descent into Hell

Craiglockhart HospitalMay 1917- March 1918

“I have been reading Siegfried Sassoon and am feeling at a very high pitch of emotion. Nothing like his trench life sketches has ever been written or will be written. Shakespeare reads vapid after these. Not of course because Sassoon is a greater artist, but, because of the subjects, I mean. I think if I had the choice of making friends with Tennyson or with Sassoon I would go to Sassoon.”

The meeting with SassoonAug – Nov 1917

“You have fixed my life – however short. You did not light me: I was always a mad comet; but you have fixed me. I spin round you like a satellite for a month, but I shall swing out soon, a dark star in the orbit where you will blaze. It is some consolation to know that Jupiter himself swims out of ken!”

November 1917Manchesters in Scarborough

Robert Graves‘For God’s sake cheer up and write more optimistically...a

poet should have a spirit above wars’

March – June 1918The last creative Spring

in Ripon

ProtestCheerfulnessDescriptionGriefPhilosophy

Disabled & other poems

‘When I go from hence, let this be my parting word, that what I

have seen is unsurpassable.’

Tagore

September – October 1917The Hindenburg line

‘Inflicted considerablelosses on the

enemy’

‘Took a number of prisoners’

The River SelleNovember 4th 1918