Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen was an English poet and soldier whose four-year military service across 1915–1918 produced one of the foundational bodies of work in 20th-century English war poetry — particularly his anti-war poems "Dulce et Decorum est" and "Anthem for Doomed Youth." He was born Wilfred Edward Salter Owen on March 18, 1893, in Oswestry, Shropshire, England, into a working-class English Anglican family. His father Tom Owen was a railway-station master and his mother Susan Shaw was a homemaker. The Owen family's 1897 relocation to Birkenhead, Cheshire, was produced by his father's employment with the Great Western Railway.

His education at the Birkenhead Institute (1900–1907) and the Shrewsbury Technical School (1907–1911) launched his early-career path. His failure to win a London University scholarship in 1911 launched his early-career path as a parish-pastoral assistant to the Reverend Herbert Wigan in Dunsden, Oxfordshire (1911–1913), and his subsequent 1913–1915 work as a private English-language tutor in Bordeaux and Bagnères-de-Bigorre, France.

His October 1915 enlistment as a volunteer in the Artists Rifles Officers' Training Corps in London — and his subsequent June 1916 commissioning as a second lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment — launched his military service. His January–April 1917 first-line French Western Front service across the Battle of the Somme aftermath produced his shell-shock diagnosis and his June–November 1917 medical evacuation to the Craiglockhart War Hospital outside Edinburgh, Scotland.

His four-month Craiglockhart War Hospital recovery — and his foundational meeting with fellow English war poet Siegfried Sassoon (who was simultaneously recovering at Craiglockhart) — produced his foundational war-poetry literary mentorship under Sassoon. His subsequent August 1918 return to active French Western Front service — and his October 1, 1918 winning of the Military Cross for his command of two German pillboxes during the Battle of the Beaurevoir Line — preceded his November 4, 1918 death by enemy machine-gun fire at the Sambre–Oise Canal in Ors, France, exactly one week before the November 11, 1918 Armistice. He was 25 at his death. His mother received the telegram announcing his death on November 11, 1918, the day of the Armistice. His foundational war poetry was published posthumously by Sassoon in 1920.

His name Wilfred derives from the Old English root meaning "will-peace" or "desired peace." Wilfred has been a rare but enduring English boys' name across the 19th and 20th centuries.