Remembering Wilfred Owen: The WWI poet who shared the horrors of war

"SHREWSBURY OFFICER KILLED – Sec. Lieut. Wilfred E. S. Owen, eldest son of Mr. and Mrs T. Owen, Mahim, Monkmoor Road, attached to 2nd Batt. Manchester Regt., was killed in action on November 4th in France."

The Shrewsbury Chronicle then moved on to news of the Mayor of Shrewsbury attending divine service at St Chad's Church.

Just a brief mention in the local paper then of the death of Wilfred Owen, and no mention at all of his poetry.

And this was the poet considered by some to be the greatest of the Great War.

Like others who have achieved belated recognition, his work was overlooked in his own times but went on to chime and resonate with those of later generations as starkly portraying the true horrors of that conflict.

He was killed in action in November 1918 exactly a week before the Armistice and it is said that it was while the bells were ringing in celebration in Shrewsbury that his mother received the dreaded telegram that she had lost her son.

Wilfred Owen, who was 25, was just another fallen son, among many fallen sons, his poetry known to a select few but without a popular audience.

Owen was leading his platoon in an attack on a German position on the opposite bank of the Sambre-Oise canal when he and 104 other men were scythed down under a hail of machinegun fire.

In the confusion of battle, his final moments are unknown. Some say he died on the water’s edge, others on a raft.

Four Victoria Crosses were awarded for that morning’s work, two posthumously, their holders buried in the same row as Owen at Ors communal cemetery.

On his headstone, his own words form the inscription: "Shall life renew these bodies? Of a truth, All death will he annul."

The words, from his poem The End, were chosen by his mother Susan, and do not in fact reflect the full meaning, as in the poem the full second line is a question rather than a statement – "All death will he annul, all tears assuage?"

At the time of his death few of his poems had been published and outside his family and a small literary circle, his work was unknown.

Owen’s poems were, in his words, about “war, and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity.”

John Murry, editor of the literary review The Athenaeum, wrote of Owen's poem Strange Meeting in December 1919 that it had "an awe, an immensity, an adequacy to that which has been most profound in the experience of a generation."

A slim volume of his work was printed after the war, but the critical response was mixed.

His reputation has been like a slow burning fuse, growing steadily brighter through the decades, and the work of this once obscure poet is now studied by schoolchildren.

Among his best-known works are Dulce et Decorum Est, Insensibility, Anthem for Doomed Youth, Futility, Spring Offensive and Strange Meeting.

Rather than portraying war as noble, glorious, and patriotic, Owen spoke in a language which brings home the realities of life, and terrible death, in the trenches, such as in this well-known extract from Dulce et Decorum Est describing a gas attack.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

The poem finishes: The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

This final Latin line is taken from the Roman poet Horace, and translates as "it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country."

The Latin inscription was carried on some memorials honouring the war dead, although Owen's use was of course ironic and a repudiation of the "glory of war."

Anthem for Doomed Youth begins:

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

– Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle

Physically he was small — 5ft 5ins — and before military service wore his hair what was considered long. He was a smart dresser, a smoker, could play the piano and speak French.

His letters to his mother suggest he was a bit of a hypochondriac. She kept all his correspondence, but on his strict instructions burnt a sackful of his papers unread after his death.

It has left some aspects of Owen’s life and personality an enigma, including his sexuality.

Born in Oswestry, his early years were spent in Birkenhead.

The Shropshire connection was renewed when his father Tom became Assistant Superintendent at Shrewsbury station.

The family moved into a house called Mahim — so named by Tom after a suburb in Bombay — in Monkmoor Road, Shrewsbury, and Wilfred went to Shrewsbury Technical School close to the banks of the River Severn and the English Bridge. The building of Owen's day was later demolished and replaced in the 1930s.

The Owens were a middle class family, although not well off, and churchgoers, getting to their favourite church at Uffington by rope-hauled ferry over the Severn.

Wilfred, the eldest of four children, was a studious boy, and began to worship Keats. Nobody knows for sure when he started writing poetry himself, although it seems to have been in his teenage years.

After leaving school at 18 he went to Wyle Cop elementary school as a temporary pupil teacher and then acted as a lay assistant to a vicar at Dunsden, near Reading. It didn’t work out.

When war broke out in August 1914 Owen was in France teaching English. He showed no inclination to rush to join the colours, remarking drily that the guns would “effect a little useful weeding”.

Yet in October the following year he enlisted in the Artists Rifles Officers' Training Corps. As the name suggests, the regiment had traditionally drawn its volunteers from what might be broadly termed "arty" backgrounds.

In June 1916 he was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant into the Manchester Regiment and in December of that year he crossed the English Channel to join his battalion.

Serving at the front in early 1917, he suffered “seventh hell.” On one occasion he held an advanced dugout in No Man’s Land for 50 hours under German bombardment. In April a large shell landed two yards from his head and blew him into the air.

Owen began to crack up. He was evacuated with shell shock and was sent to Craiglockhart hospital in Edinburgh, which tried to heal the shattered nerves of officers overwhelmed by their experiences.

More importantly for Owen’s literary ambitions, it was here that he met the poet protester Siegfried Sassoon.

Sassoon warmed to the little poet from the provinces, and his friendship, advice and encouragement gave Owen new impetus. A period of great productivity followed.

Sassoon is consistently hailed as Owen’s predominant inspiration and influence, with the Imperial War Museum’s manuscript copy of Anthem for Doomed Youth – featuring handwritten amendments by Sassoon – existing as a testament to Owen's trust and his guidance.

Eventually Owen was fit enough to return to France where the static war of the trenches had been superseded by mobile warfare and rapid advances by the allies but with continuing stubborn German resistance. In October 1918 he was awarded the Military Cross “for conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty” during an attack.

He wrote to his mother: “I can find no word to qualify my experiences except the word sheer. It passed the limits of my abhorrence. I lost all my earthly faculties and fought like an angel.”

He was delighted by the MC, no doubt feeling it gave his voice a new validity by making him a recognised war hero, as was Sassoon, who had also won the MC.

He had concluded a letter to his mother four days before his death with the words: “Of this I am certain, you could not be visited by a band of friends half so fine as surround me here.”

Apart from his influential poetic legacy, Owen has been remembered in a wide variety of ways, including being honoured in sculpture, written up in books, celebrated in concerts, and having places named after him.

A few years ago a walking trail was opened by tourism chiefs in France – although Owen's work is not so well known in that country – allowing visitors more or less literally to follow in his final footsteps up to his death on that fateful day in 1918.

The Wilfred Owen Association was formed in 1989 to commemorate his life and work. Owen's home from 1910 until his death, Mahim, already had a small plaque but perhaps it is an indication of his growing stature that in 2010 association members replaced it with a much larger one.

Modern research has also shed some new light on things which may have influenced his outlook. For instance, it has been discovered that while the family lived in Birkenhead his mother looked after a neighbour's baby after the mother fell ill, and that that neighbour's family had German roots, having changed their name from Schmid to Smith.

The child, Susie, became Mrs Owen's godchild and was named after her.

Other things continue to be matters of conjecture and speculation hotly debated by historians, writers, and academics. It has been claimed by some, for instance, that Wilfred was gay, and there have been nudge-nudge insinuations about his friendships with boys.

Information which might have been enlightening has been lost through his mother's destruction of documents, and Wilfred's brother Harold redacting others before releasing them.

The centenary of his death in 2018 was marked both in his home county and further afield.

On October 20 a statue of the poet was unveiled in Cae Glas Park, Oswestry, the town of his birth.

Most poignantly, a ceremony took place at his graveside in France attended by Elizabeth Owen, widow of his nephew Peter.

During the ceremony a bugle that Wilfred had retrieved from the battlefield in 1917 – he had described it as "loot’ – was played for the first time in public.

Over 100 years after his death, Owen's poetry will continue to speak to this and future generations as they strive to understand the experiences of those who fought in the First World War.

Wilfred Owen key facts

Born: March 18, 1893, at Plas Wilmot, Weston Lane, Oswestry. Later lived at Birkenhead.

Shrewsbury days: The Owens moved to 1 Cleveland Place, Underdale Road, Shrewsbury, in 1907, and to Mahim, Monkmoor Road, in 1910. Wilfred attended Shrewsbury Technical School and on leaving at 18 taught at Wyle Cop elementary school for a time.

War record: Joined up October 1916, trained with the Artists Rifles and served at the front in the Manchester Regiment in early 1917. In April a shell landed two yards from his head and probably brought on the shell shock which led to him being evacuated to hospital in Scotland. After he recovered he eventually returned to France, winning the Military Cross in October 1918. He was killed during a near-suicidal attempt to cross the Sambre-Oise canal on November 4, 1918.

Legacy: Poems like Dulce et Decorum Est and Anthem for Doomed Youth have a power and directness which have brought home the meaning of war to new generations.