Owen, Wilfred Edward Salter (1893–1918)

English poet. His verse, owing much to the encouragement of English poet Siegfried Sassoon, is among the most moving of World War I poetry; it shatters the illusion of the glory of war, revealing its hollowness and the cruel destruction of beauty. Only four poems were published during his lifetime; he was killed in action a week before the Armistice. After Owen's death, Sassoon collected and edited his Poems (1920). Among the best known are ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ and ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, published in 1921. English composer Benjamin Britten used several of the poems in his War Requiem (1962). In technique Owen's work is distinguished by the extensive use of assonance in place of rhyme, anticipating the later school of the poets W H Auden and Stephen Spender.

Owen was born in Plas Wilmot, Oswestry, Shropshire, and educated at Birkenhead Institute and London University. He went to France in 1913 as a tutor, returning to England to enlist in the Artists' Rifles in 1915; two years later he was invalided home and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh, where Sassoon was his fellow patient. Sent back to France as a company commander, he won the Military Cross, but was killed in the crossing of the Sambre Canal.