WILFRED OWEN

Wilfred Owen was aged 25 when he died, just one week before the signing of the Armistice that would end World War I. He was killed in action by enemy fire while leading his men of the 2nd Manchester Regiment across the Sambre-oise Canal in northern France. His mother Susan received the fated telegram as Shrewsbury bells rang in celebration on 11 November 1918. While just five of Owen’s poems were published during his short lifetime, his legacy in literature today is remarkable, and he is widely regarded as the finest war poet of the Great War.

Owen was first sent to France in 1916 as a second lieutenant, before he returned with shell-shock and spent time recuperating at Edinburgh’s Craiglockhart War Hospital. As his philosophy on the futility of combat evolved – mostly under the tutelage of fellow bard Siegfried Sassoon – so did his verse; he wrote keenly and candidly, expressing the horrors of the trenches with a sharp and devastating beauty influenced by his love of Romanticism.

I was introduced to Owen inside a Lincolnshire classroom by a dear and formative teacher whose literary passions shaped so many of my own, and I was besotted at first read. My infatuation grew on a school trip to the scarred landscape of the Somme: a tour of the old frontline, peppered with poetry recitals at notable landmarks, often at the side of their author. A deviating trip to the small village of Ors, Owen’s final resting place among his comrades, was on the itinerary, and I still remember how much of a pilgrimage that first visit to his gravesite felt. It still does whenever I journey there now.

A joy of poetry isn’t only that it can make us feel, but that it can teach us something, too, and Owen’s work is a stunning lens through which to see the most monstrous of conflicts, over a century after its occurrence. Whatever else I might read to understand the Great War, I always and unfailingly return to Owen: he is, for me, an unparalleled voice for that moment in history.