Wilfred Owen

Biography
The poet of Dulce et Decorum Est.
 Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen MC

BORN : 18 MARCH 1893

OSWESTRY, SHROPSHIRE, ENGLAND

DIED: 4 NOVEMBER 1918 (AGED 25)

SAMBRE–OISE CANAL, FRANCE

SERVICE /BRANCH:
BRITISH ARMY

YEARS OF SERVICE:
1915–1918

GENRE
WAR POETRY

HE WAS AN ENGLISH POETAND SOLDIER. HE WAS

ONE OF THE LEADING POETS OF THE FIRST
WORLD WAR. NOTED FOR HIS ANGER AT THE
CRUELTY AND WASTE OF WAR AND HIS PITY FOR
ITS VICTIMS. HE ALSO IS SIGNIFICANT FOR HIS
TECHNICAL EXPERIMENTS IN ASSONANCE, WHICH
WERE PARTICULARLY INFLUENTIAL IN THE 1930S.

 Only five of Owen's poems were published

before his death, one in fragmentary form.
His best known poems include "Anthem for
Doomed Youth", "Futility", "Dulce Et Decorum
Est", "The Parable of the Old Men and the
Young" and "Strange Meeting". However,
most of them were published after his death:
Poems (1920),The Poems of Wilfred Owen
(1931),The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen
(1963),The Complete Poems and Fragments
(1983); fundamental in this last collection is
the poem Soldier's Dream, that deals with
Owen's conception of war.

He studied at Birkenhead Institute and

narrowly failed to gain a scholarship to the
University of London. As a youth, influenced
by his mother, he became a devout reader of
the Bible and became a staunch Anglican.

Wilfred Owen was influenced by John Keats

because when Owen was a child and in the
army he read many of Keat's work and
adopted Keat's style in some of his own
poems such as The Anthem of Doomed Youth
and some poems such as 'Written in a Wood,
September 1910' and 'On seeing a lock of
Keats's hair' which were tributes to Keats.