Wilfred Owen was born in Oswestry, England on March 18th, 1893. His family was middle class with one sister and two brothers. His mother was a deeply religious Calvinist who remained very close to Wilfred for most of his life. His father was an independent, impatient man who enjoyed reading and music. Both parents had a profound affect on Wilfred's life. As a child, he studied botany, archaeology, and read a great deal. At the time of his death, over 325 volumes of poets such as Dante, Chaucer, Goethe, Cowper, Southey, Gray, Collins, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Burns, Browning, and Tennyson, were found in his own personal collection. Although he couldn't afford a University education, he studied at Shrewsbury Technical School until 1911, when he went to Dunsden, Oxfordshire, as a pupil and lay assistant to the vicar.

It was in Dunsden, visiting the rural slums of Oxfordshire, that he was brought up against the cruelest facts of life such as sickness, squalor, and poverty far worse than the middle class family he was brought up in. This experience helped to knock holes in his introspective view of life. It is in his early letters from Dunsden that the convicted, compassionate force that drives through the war poems got its start. Before this and the war, much of his poems were very Keatsian, glowing with grandeur like technicolor sunsets. They were airy and dreamy, like the poems of the average adolescent aspiring poet. Dunsden was probably the first time his poems began to pick up more substance.

In 1914, Owen went to live with the Legar family to tutor two Catholic boys in France. When war broke out he was living the life of a cultivated, French provincial society, and on excellent terms with his employer, Mme. Legar. Though the two carried on a light-hearted, almost flirtatious relationship, he still showed little appreciation for women. In an undated letter from Bordeaux, he had written,

'All women, without exception, utterly annoy me, and the mercenaries...I utterly detest." In his poem, "Greater Love," he sees women as not quite worthy of the men who are dying in France.

Owen's first experience with the war is actually not on the battlefield, but in a hospital where many casualties had recently arrived from the front lines. There he witnessed several surgeries performed without anesthesia of which he wrote to his family. The letters are ruthless and self-important, but there is a sharpness in the observation and a truthfulness we observe in his later poems. He wanted to shock, but not just for the sake of shocking. At first he had no desire to enter the service. He had not written or read poetry for quite some time, and felt he should pursue business. However, by June 4th, 1916, he was commissioned in the Manchester Regiment. At the end of the year, he was sent to France.

For the next two years, his life was, what could only be described as hell. However, it was these years in which his poetry rapidly matured. Gone were the days of false poeticism and etheral air, devoid of substance and conviction. It should be explained that the environment of the war was very much the same wherever you were sent-- a desolate landscape of trenches, craters, barbed wire, ruined buildings, splintered trees, mud, and the corpses of animals and men. Owen's poetry of this time was also very much filled with protest and social criticism. At the time, there was a great gulf between the fighting man and the civilian at home, and between the front-line and the commanding officers. Wilfred often felt more compassion for those on the other side of the barbed wire, shooting at him, rather than the men and women at home profiting from or ignoring the war.

The war poems reveal Owen as a poet equipped in both technique and temperment alike. They purged him of self-pity and poetic nostalgia, becoming his beautiful and powerful children of war. Crafted out of gun powder, blood, pain, and anger, they come together to paint pictures of a nightmare we can't imagine in our most restless sleep. One of his most famous poems is called "Anthem for Doomed Youth," which in both style and content, represents a haunting yet brilliant elegy for the men who march off to their deaths during WWI.

Anthem for Doomed Youth

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,--
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.


What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of the boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Written at Craiglockhart, a war hospital where Owen was rested for 4 months after contracting Trench fever, this poem was probably inspired by the casualties he saw each day as young, dead faces passed from his sight daily. Though it has been edited and reworked several times, it is considered one of his masterpieces.

In the first lines, we have the images of these young soldiers being sent off to slaughter like cattle. Here, war is not glorious, wonderful, or heroic. It is simply one large funeral where the usual death rituals are replaced with war's own. The church bells that ring when someone dies, has transformed into gunfire. One of the most important lines is the middle verse, "No mockeries now for them; no prayers, nor bells." Here, Owen seems to be saying that the traditional rites for death are mockeries. The beautiful peal of bells and choirs is not, indeed what death it about. They only mock a miserable ending. Wilfred believes that the choirs of shells and rifles seems more appropriate to eulogize these lost ones in their inevitable death.

The second stanza is even more haunting as he shows how there will be no real candles to mourn the dead, but only the candles of their blazed life seen in the glimmer of their eyes. He claims, this is their true good-byes, as the last light of consciousness extinguishes. Everywhere it seems, there is no time to mourn for the dead. When one does show the patience to consider a dead boy of the battlefield, he is seen as flowers for that dead person. In this poem, the ceremony of innocence has drowned. The last line, conveys not only the attitude of the soldiers, but also of some of the people back home, echoing a bit of Owen's frustrations about the civilian's refusal to acknowledge the horrible nightmare of this war. "And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds," represents the soldiers need to move on and forget the death of comrades in an environment where people die every day. These doomed youth are killed, but they cannot be dwelled upon. However, this line is symbolic of how the people who profit from the war are taking the situation. They draw their blinds on the dead so they can feel better about sending more troops to the war.

It seems as though this poem should've been written during the sixties at a time when anti-war sentiments were at their strongest. Richly ahead of its time, "Anthem for Doomed Youth" is one of the most haunting and prophetic jewels on Owen's crown. In the beginning of his book of war poems he wrote, "Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful."

Wilfred, himself, was killed almost a year after he wrote "Anthem" and buried between two privates in the corner of a village cemetery at Ors. His grave was marked with a simple cross with a gravestone.

Bibliography:

Lewis, Day C. ed. The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. By Wilfred Owen. New York: New Directions, 1963.

Stallworthy, Jon. Wilfred Owen New York: Oxford, 1977.

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