Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was an English poet. He was born in 1893 at Plas Wilmot, Oswestry, Shropshire and died in 1918. He was educated at Birkenhead Institute and London University. He went to France 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 MC, but was killed in the crossing of the SambreCanal. His verse, owing much to the encouragement of Siegfried Sassoon, is among the most moving of Great War poetry; it shatters the illusion of the glory of war, revealing its hollowness and cruel destruction of beauty. Only four poems were published during his lifetime; he was killed in action a week before the Armistice. Sassoon posthumously collected and edited his Poems in 1920. Among the best known are 'Dulce et Decorum Est' and 'Anthem for Doomed Youth', published in 1921. Benjamin Britten used
several of the poems in his War Requiem of 1962. In technique Owen's work is distinguished by the extensive use of assonance in place of rhyme, anticipating the later school of W H Auden and Stephen Spender. Research Wilfred Owen
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