Life Summary

Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) was not successful in his attempts to be either an academic or a cleric (he finally rejected the established church when he recognized his homosexuality). In 1913 he became a poorly paid English tutor in France, and in 1915 he returned to England to enlist in the Artists' Rifles, and was then commissioned into the Manchester Regiment. At the Somme he suffered shell-shock and was sent to the War Hospital in Edinburgh in summer 1917. There he met the poet Siegfried Sassoon, and his friendship with Owen marked the turning-point of Owen's poetical development. When Sassoon said goodbye to Owen at the Conservative Club in Edinburgh in November 1917 he gave him a sealed envelope containing £10 and the London address of Oscar Wilde's lover Robert Ross, through whom he met Osbert Sitwell, Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells and many other writers. He hero-worshipped Sassoon, and the result was some very moving war poetry: "My subject is war, and the pity of war." He returned to the front, but was wounded and invalided home in July 1918. After a spell in hospital he was back with his battalion at Amiens in September, and he was awarded the Military Cross for conspicuous gallantry in October. His experiences in the war were not always unbearably painful, as he noted in a letter to his cousin Leslie Gunston on October 15, October 1918: "There are two French girls in my billet, daughters of the Mayor, who (I suppose because of my French) single me for their joyful gratitude for La Déliverance. Naturally I talk to them a good deal; so much so that the jealousy of other officers resulted in a Subalterns' Court Martial being held on me! The dramatic irony was too killing, considering certain other things, not possible to tell in a letter." There at the line west of the Sambre-Oise Canal, near Ors, Owen was killed during a dawn attack across the canal on November 4, 1918, together with one other officer and twenty-two other ranks. The war ended one week later. His eloquent Poems, permeated by an erotic identification with his comrades, were published posthumously in 1920, edited by Sassoon and Edith Sitwell. Years later Sassoon wrote that "W's death was an unhealed wound, & the ache of it has been with me ever since. I wanted him back – not his poems." Most of the letters Owen wrote from the front were to his mother, but he also wrote to Sassoon between November 1917 and October 1918; unfortunately Sassoon destroyed many of the letters. His mother burned "a sack full" of his papers, apparently at his own request, and his brother Harold for many years prevented research into Wilfred's private life.