Wilfred Owen, soldier and poet

b. 1893; d. 4 November 1918

English poet, born at Oswestry, Shropshire. Educated at Birkenhead Institute and London University, he was for a time tutor to a French family near Bordeaux. In the First World War he enlisted in the Artist's Rifles, but was invalided home in 1917 and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital, where Siegfried Sassoon, his fellow patient, encouraged him in writing verse. Sent back to France as a company commander, he won the MC, but was killed a week before the armistice in the crossing of the Sambre Canal.

His Poems, 1920, edited by Sassoon, shatter the illusion of the glory of war, revealing its hollowness, wreckage, and the beauty it ruins. His verse is among the most moving of all First World War poetry. In technique his work is distinguished by the extensive use of assonance in place of rhyme, a feature in which Owen looked forward to the later school of Auden and Spender. Benjamin Britten used several of Owen's poems in his War Requiem, 1962.

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