Wilfred Owen
'My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.'
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen (1893-1918) was born to Thomas and Susan Owen on the 18th of March 1893 near Oswestry, Shropshire. Upon the death of Owens's grandfather in 1897, the Owen family were forced to move from the house he had owned in Oswestry to lodgings in Birkenhead (1898), Merseyside, and it was in the Birkenhead Institute that Owen's education began. In 1907, when Thomas Owen was appointed Assistant Superintendent for the Western Region of the railways, the family moved to Shrewsbury where Owen's education continued at the Shrewsbury Borough Technical School. Upon leaving school at 18, Owen spent a period of months working as a pupil-teacher at Wyle Cop School. In the autumn he passed the matriculation examination for the University of London but without the first class honours needed to gain a scholarship. Unable to afford to study, he worked as lay assistant to the Vicar of Dunsden near Reading. In his spare time he also attended University College, Reading, and is known to have studied the diverse subjects of botany and poetry. Between 1913 and 1915 Owen travelled to Bordeaux,…
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| # | Resource Title | Description | Contributor |
|---|---|---|---|
| 11 | Owen's influence on Carol Ann Duffy | Carol Ann Duffy's poem "An Unseen" depicts a soldier going off to war, but we don't know which war… | Marcy Tanter |
| 12 | "The Poetry is in the Pity": Wilfred Owen and the Memory of the First World War | A memorial to the poets of the First World War stands in the corner of Westminster Abbey. Inscribed… | Vincent Trott |
| 13 | 4-11 November 1918: Wilfred Owen and armistice Day in Memory and History | In an early preface to his collected war poems, Wilfred Owen wrote of his work that "The subject of… | Alex Nordlund |
| 14 | Wilfred Owen: The '60s Poet | With the centenary of the first Armistice Day - and the centenary of Wilfred Owen's death a week… | Harry Ricketts |
| 15 | Dulce et Decorum Est: Wilfred Owen’s Latin | Wilfred Owen fought hard to learn Latin. He was acutely aware of the importance of the classical… | Elizabeth Vandiver |
| 16 | Wilfred Owen and the Culture of Commemoration | We can approach the First World War from the perspective of the historian, with a view to providing… | Eva Zettelmann |
| 17 | At the Water’s Edge: Wilfred Owen and Water | By the look of the photograph reproduced in Jon Stallworthy's biography, it was a fairly run-of-the… | Gerald Dawe |
| 18 | Postcard from the Front Lines of Teaching "Dulce et Decorum Est" | Wilfred Owen is the most famous of the World War One soldier-poets, and "Dulce et Decorum Est" is… | Eleanor Mary Boudreau |
| 19 | SHEER: Setting Wilfred Owen to Music | "I can find no word to qualify my experiences except the word SHEER... It passed the limits… | Tim Watts |
| 20 | "Smile, Smile, Smile": Wilfred Owen and the Politicians | Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag And smile, smile, smile... One of the most… | Douglas Kerr |