One interesting thing about the war was how eager young guys were to jump into the fighting. In Britain, lots of them signed up right away, wanting to do their part during those tough times.
But once they got there, they saw the harsh reality of trench warfare, and there’s this one guy who really nailed it in his poetry: Wilfred Owen.
Wilfred Owens Upbringing & Early Influences
Wilfred Owen was born on March 18, 1893 in Shropshire, England. He was the oldest of four kids and his dad worked for the railroad but had a tough time supporting the family.
They moved around a lot during the 1890s until they settled in Birkenhead. There, Wilfred went to Birkenhead Institute and got into reading writers like Shakespeare and Dickens. He was a smart kid and even had a friendly competition with his pal Alec Paton.
When he was fourteen, they moved again to Shrewsbury. Wilfred kept studying at Shrewsbury Technical School by the River Severn. His schoolwork showed he was into epic poems like Horatius and The Faerie Queene, as well as Shakespeare’s plays like Macbeth and Othello.
It’s not clear when he started writing poetry, but one of his early poems called To Poesy seems inspired by John Keats.
After finishing at the technical school, he became a pupil-teacher at Wyle Cop School before working in Dunsden while studying at University College, Reading. On Sundays, he helped out with church activities.
In 1913, Owen left for France to teach English part-time in Bordeaux. But just a year later, World War I broke out and changed everything.
The First World War Begins
This is a photo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife leaving City Hall just before they were assassinated in 1914. After the Archduke was killed by a Serbian-backed terrorist, Austro-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Russia supported Serbia, bringing France into the conflict. Germany then declared war on Russia and France, and Britain joined when Germany invaded Belgium.
Germany’s Schlieffen Plan involved quickly invading France before Russia could fully mobilize. But after losing at the Battle of the Marne, the Germans had to retreat behind the River Aisne and start digging trenches.
Trench warfare, famously depicted in Wilfred Owen’s war poems, became synonymous with World War I. Life in the trenches was tough, with mud and filth everywhere. Soldiers faced long periods of boredom interrupted by sudden artillery attacks.
Artillery was used to bombard enemy trenches and clear barbed wire so soldiers could advance. However, soldiers often just waited out the shelling, then emerged to mow down the approaching enemy with machine guns.
Poetry in the Trenches
This is a photo of a trench from World War One taken by an unknown photographer around 1914-1918. It’s hard to say exactly how Wilfred Owen felt about the war right away because he didn’t date his poetry manuscripts often. But we do know that The Ballad of Purchase-Money was one of the first poems he wrote once the war began.
Unlike his famous poem Dulce et Decorum Est, this earlier piece actually portrays war in a positive way, seeing it as something honorable. In September 1915, over a year after the war started, Owen came back to England and joined the military. He trained at Hare Hall Camp in Essex, where he lived in a barrack hut and learned various soldier skills.
After fourteen months of training, Owen was sent to France for active duty. He became a second lieutenant and went through some of the worst times of WWI: the harsh winter of 1916 to spring 1917 and the final months of the war in 1918.
During this time, Owen wrote about the brutal reality of trench warfare. In his well-known poem Anthem for Doomed Youth, he vividly describes the terrible conditions on the Western Front with phrases like “choirs of wailing shells” and “the rapid rattle of machine-gun fire.”
In Exposure, Owen talks about how helpless soldiers are in the face of the enemy, showing the pointlessness of the conflict. Similar ideas are seen in Greater Love, where he challenges the romanticized view of war from the Victorian era.
The ending of Dulce et Decorum Est really sums up Owen’s view on the war, exposing the false idea of dying honorably in battle. After witnessing the horrors of the Western Front, he completely rejected the romantic image of war he initially portrayed in The Ballad of Purchase-Money.

Death & Renown
This is a photo from Armistice Day celebrations in Birmingham, England, back in 1918. Wilfred Owen, a famous poet from World War I, unfortunately didn’t make it to the end of the war. He was killed in France just a week before Armistice Day.
When Owen died, he wasn’t well-known as a poet. Only his mom and a few poet friends had read his work. But later on, his friends Siegfried Sassoon and Edith Sitwell put together a collection of his poems, which was published in 1920. Then, another poet named Edmund Blunden edited a bigger collection of Owens poems in 1931, which helped boost his reputation even more.
Owen’s popularity continued to rise over the years. His poetry was even used in a piece for Coventry Cathedral in 1962, which got people interested in his work again. His younger brother Harold also wrote a memoir about their family between 1963 and 1965, which added to Wilfred’s legacy.
Because of his growing fame, people started analyzing and debating Owen’s works, especially those interested in poetry and World War I. Biographies were written about him, and his life story inspired fictional works too. Nowadays, his poetry is studied in schools and universities across Britain, and it has been translated into different languages like German, French, and Russian.
World War I Poets Beyond Wilfred Owen
It’s good to keep in mind that Wilfred Owen is just one of the many British writers who depicted the horrors of World War I. Siegfried Sassoon, another notable writer, is also remembered in Britain for his work during that time.
Unlike Owen, Sassoon joined the war right when it started. Initially excited about the idea of war, he later criticized how it was being conducted, especially after the Battle of the Somme. One of his most famous poems, “Suicide in the Trenches,” was published during the war in a collection called Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918).
Isaac Rosenberg gained recognition after the war. He was actually a pacifist but joined the army due to financial struggles as he came from a poor family in London. While in the trenches, Rosenberg wrote several poems, with “Break of Day in the Trenches” being his most famous. Like Owen, he died in combat towards the end of the war and became renowned posthumously.
Rupert Brooke, on the other hand, became famous in 1915. With poetry awards and a degree from the University of Cambridge, he rose to fame when his poem “The Soldier” was read at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. He passed away a few months later, but his work, like that of his fellow poets, has become part of British culture.
It’s crucial to remember that Owen’s work is just a piece of a larger puzzle in British history. For those interested in exploring World War I poetry, Owen can serve as a starting point to delve into a broader subject.
While it’s important to recognize this, there’s a reason why Owen is the most well-known war poet in British history. More than his peers, he effectively captured the senselessness and horror of World War I, debunking the glorified notion of a noble death