Wilfred Owen: Poems

Wilfred Owen (1893–1918), Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and others are inaccurately referred to as soldier-poets of World War I. Although an increasing number of active-duty soldiers wrote poems from 1914 on, they mostly portrayed the war in glorious and simple terms. Owen and his peers set themselves in opposition to that style and were more observant of the war's grim realities and the gap between themselves and those at home.

Owen joined the British army in 1915 and, with his regiment, endured horrific experiences eventually requiring that he be sent in 1917 to a military hospital for treatment of “shell shock” (today called “posttraumatic stress disorder”). He had written poetry earlier, but at the hospital he met a fellow officer and published poet, Siegfried Sassoon, who encouraged him and soon introduced him to his artistic circle of friends. In July 1918, Owen returned to active duty in France and was killed a week before the war's end. His volume of Poems was published two years after his death in an edition edited and introduced by Sassoon.