Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen is a 1974 biography of the British war poet by Jon Stallworthy, himself a British poet as well as a biographer and an expert on Owen’s work. Stallworthy narrates Owen’s short life, focusing on the development of his literary talent, and its extraordinary flourishing under wartime conditions. Stallworthy brings his own poetic experience to bear on these topics. Drawing on the thorough, three-volume biography and Letters published by Owen’s brother Harold in the 1960s, Stallworthy attempts to retrieve the real poet from his brother’s somewhat idealized version.

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born in 1893 in Shropshire, England, the eldest of four children. His parents, Thomas and Susan, were living at the time with Wilfred’s maternal grandfather, Edward Shaw.

When Edward died, the house was sold, and the family moved into less picturesque surroundings: the back streets of the northern English city of Birkenhead. Thomas began working for the railway company, eventually becoming a stationmaster. Wilfred grew up playing in the streets of the city and went to school at the Birkenhead Institute and Shrewsbury Technical School.



From an early age, he revealed a sensitive character. He was a devout believer in his mother’s Anglican faith, and a devotee of the Romantic poets, particularly Keats. Stallworthy notes that Owen certainly shared his hero’s hypochondriacal sensitivity. During a family holiday in Cheshire in 1904, Owen decided that he wanted to write poetry. Stallworthy characterizes this early poetry as conventional and sentimental, displaying at most the makings of a mediocre poetic talent.

Owen’s family was a happy one. His father worried about the young Owen’s lack of practical plans, especially when he failed to win a scholarship to the University of London. Owen began working as a lay assistant to the Vicar of Dunsden, near Reading, and attending classes in botany and Old English at the University of Reading. His first-hand experience of the workings of the Church of England disillusioned the young man: he saw it as stuffily ceremonial and oblivious to the needs of parishioners.

Owen was working as a private tutor in France when war was declared. He did not enlist at once. Becoming friends with the established French poet Laurent Tailhade, Owen considered enlisting in the French army before finally returning to England to volunteer in 1916, two years after the outbreak of fighting.



He was sent immediately to the Front in France. This sensitive young man was installed in a two-foot-high ditch full of stinking mud. Shells and machine-gun fire passed overhead. His letters home capture the horror and the shock of conditions in the trenches.

Owen’s company was all but wiped out, and Owen began to display symptoms of “neurasthenia” (what we would now call PTSD). He was sent to Craiglockheart Hospital in Edinburgh, which specialized in the psychiatric treatment of men traumatized by their experiences at the Front.

One of the author patients at Craiglockheart was the poet Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon, well known as a poet and as a decorated soldier, had published a statement in the British press declaring the War unjust: he believed that since the outbreak it had become a war of aggression on the British side. He threw his Military Cross into the River Mersey. In response to Sassoon’s criticism, the army ensured that the poet was issued with a psychiatric diagnosis: “suffering from hallucinations.”



At once, Owen became devoted to the older poet. Sassoon was almost a decade older than Owen, from a wealthy background and, most importantly, already a successful poet. Very soon after their first meeting, Owen stopped writing poems derivative of his hero Keats and began to write poems in imitation of his new hero, Sassoon.

At Craiglockheart, Owen lay awake listening to the cries of haunted soldiers. He wrote a poetic manifesto in which he declared, “My subject is War and the pity of War.”

With less than a year to live, Owen fell into a blaze of creativity, producing original poems with no trace of the romantic indulgence that had characterized his work until now. In this final year, he produced all the work for which he is best remembered today, including the poems “Dulce et Decorum Est,” “Insensibility,” “The Send-Off,” “Futility,” “Strange Meeting,” and “Anthem for Doomed Youth.” These poems marked a sea change in the literary and cultural depiction of the War in Britain (and the depiction of war in general).



Upon publication, Wilfred Owen was hailed as a “restrained, perfectly modulated biography” (Kirkus Reviews). While it is still considered a valuable contribution to the study of Owen’s poetry and its context, subsequent academics and biographers have criticized Stallworthy’s silence on the question of the poet’s sexuality. Pointing to the circle of homosexual poets in which Owen moved, some authors on Owen have suggested that Stallworthy overlooked evidence that Owen was sexually active with male partners; however, this debate is ongoing.