Wilfred Owen

<p>Born in Oswestry, Shropshire, on March 18, 1893, Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was deeply influenced by the Romantic poetry of Keats and Shelley as a youth. Teaching English in Bordeaux, France, when World War I erupted, Owen felt a moral obligation to return to England and enlist in the Artists' Rifles in 1915, eventually being commissioned as a lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment.</p><p>Sent to the Western Front in early 1917, Owen experienced the unspeakable slaughter of trench warfare, suffering severe shell shock (neurasthenia) after surviving days trapped in a frozen shell hole beside the dismembered body of a fellow officer. Sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh to recuperate, Owen met the celebrated anti-war poet Siegfried Sassoon, who recognized Owen’s extraordinary poetic genius and encouraged him to channel his wartime trauma into verse.</p><p>In an explosive burst of creative maturity between 1917 and 1918, Owen created a revolutionary poetic voice utilizing innovative half-rhyme (pararhyme) and raw visceral realism to expose what he termed "the Pity of War." Defiantly returning to the front to lead his men, Owen was awarded the Military Cross for gallantry. On the foggy morning of November 4, 1918—while leading his troops across the Sambre–Oise Canal at Ors in northern France—Owen was killed by German machine-gun fire at age twenty-five. The telegram announcing his death arrived at his mother’s home in Shrewsbury on November 11, 1918, just as church bells across Britain were ringing to celebrate the Armistice.</p>