Wilfred Owen's mother learned of his death as the Armistice bells rang
Wilfred Owen died crossing the Sambre–Oise Canal on 4 November 1918, one week almost to the hour before the Armistice. The telegram reached his mother in Shrewsbury while church bells celebrated peace. He had seen only five of his poems printed; the rest made him the defining voice of the First World War.
Owen was born on 18 March 1893 near Oswestry in Shropshire, the eldest of four children, and grew up moving between Birkenhead and Shrewsbury as his father's railway job shifted. He dated his poetic calling to a holiday in Cheshire at about ten, and his early heroes were Keats and Wordsworth. A devout evangelical Anglican as a boy, he lost faith in the Church while working as a vicar's lay assistant at Dunsden near Reading, dismayed at how little it did for the poor.
He was teaching in Bordeaux when war came and did not hurry to join up. He enlisted in the Artists Rifles in October 1915 and was commissioned into the Manchester Regiment in June 1916. After concussion and a shell blast left him badly shaken, doctors diagnosed shell shock, and he was treated at Craiglockhart, an Edinburgh war hospital. There his doctor, Arthur Brock, urged him to turn his nightmares into verse, and he met Siegfried Sassoon, whose realism and satire reshaped his style. Owen fused that grit with his romantic instincts into what he called the pity of war.
He could have stayed on home duty but returned to France in 1918, partly because Sassoon had been invalided home and Owen felt someone had to keep telling the truth about the trenches. He did not tell Sassoon, who had threatened to stab him in the leg to stop him. Leading attacks near Joncourt on 1 October earned him the Military Cross, gazetted only in 1919.
Not everyone admired him. W. B. Yeats left him out of The Oxford Book of Modern Verse and dismissed him as all blood, dirt and sucked sugar stick. Yet Sassoon's promotion, support from Edith Sitwell, Edmund Blunden's fuller edition of 1931 and a revival in the 1960s lifted poems like Futility and Strange Meeting to wide fame. His experiments with pararhyme were not unique, but he was among the first to use it extensively.
Source: Wilfred Owen
