Wilfred Owen

Owen’s friends, Robert Graves and Sacheverell Sitwell, have stated that he was homosexual. It has been debated whether Owen had an affair with Scottish writer C. K. Scott-Moncrieff in May 1918.

The forester’s house in Ors, Maison forestière de l’Ermitage, where Owen spent his last night, has been transformed by Simon Patterson into an art installation and permanent memorial to Owen and his poetry.

A week before the war ended, while attempting to cross the Sambre canal, he was shot and killed on November 4, 1918. The news of his death arrived at his parents’ house in Shrewsbury on Armistice Day.

Wilfred Owen was born Wilfred Edward Salter Owen on March 18, 1893 to Thomas Owen and Harriet Susan Shaw Owen at Oswestry, Shropshire, England. The eldest of four children, his siblings were Harold, Colin and Mary Millard Owen.

The family lived in a comfortable house owned by his grandfather, Edward Shaw. The house was sold after his death. The family then stayed in Birkenhead while Thomas Owen worked with a railway company.

His father was transferred to Shrewsbury, during which time the family lived with Thomas’ parents in Canon Street. In 1898, Thomas was transferred back to Birkenhead when he became stationmaster at Woodside station.

His family moved homes three successive times in the Tranmere district. They moved back to Shrewsbury in 1907. Wilfred was educated at the Birkenhead Institute and at Shrewsbury Technical School.

He discovered his poetic talents in 1903 when he was 10 years old when holidaying in Cheshire. Raised as an Anglican of the evangelical school, he was a devout believer during his youth.

Owen was a pupil-teacher at the Wyle Cop School in Shrewsbury. In 1911, he passed the matriculation exam for the University of London, but did not qualify for scholarship.

He worked as an assistant to the Vicar of Dunsden near Reading in return for free lodging, and some tuition for the entrance exam. He also attended botany classes at University College, Reading.

He took free lessons in Old English at the behest of the English Department’s head. He was disillusioned with the Church in Dunsden parish for its ceremony and failure to help those in need.

From 1913, he worked as a private tutor of English and French at the Berlitz School of Languages in Bordeaux, France, and later with a family. There he met the French poet Laurent Tailhade.

When war broke out, he enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles Officers’ Training Corps. He trained at Hare Hall Camp in Essex. In 1916, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment.

Five poems published before Owen’s death were also his best known ones including “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, “Futility”, “Dulce Et Decorum Est”, “The Parable of the Old Men and the Young” and “Strange Meeting”.