Wilfred Owen

Description

Wilfred Owen is perhaps the most remembered of the First World War poets. Born in Oswestry in 1893, he travelled to France in 1916 and profoundly troubled by his experience of the trenches, went on to write some of the most powerful denouncements of the horrors and hypocrisies of war. On 4 November 1918, a week before Armistice, he was killed on the banks of the Sambre and Oise Canal.

Dying at twenty-five, a week before the end of the First World War, Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) has come to represent a generation of young men sacrificed - as it seems to the next generation, one in unprecedented rebellion against its fathers - by guilty old men: generals, politicians, profiteers. Owen has now taken his place in literary history as perhaps the first, certainly the quintessential, war poet. Jon Stallworthy is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature. He has published many volumes of poetry, and several biographies and works of literary criticism. His biography of Wilfred Owen won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the W H Smith Literary Award, and the E M Forster Award.