The Shop Girl

by Mary Oliver

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918).

English poet and soldier.

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He was one of the leading poets of the First World War. His war poetry on the horrors of trenches and gas warfare was heavily influenced by his mentor Siegfried Sassoon, and stood in stark contrast both to the public perception of war at the time and to the confidently patriotic verse written by earlier war poets such as Rupert Brooke. He is noted for his anger at the cruelty and waste of war and his pity for its victims. He also is significant for his technical experiments in assonance, which were particularly influential in the 1930s.

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Owen was educated at the Birkenhead Institute and matriculated at the University of London; after an illness in 1913 he lived in France. He had already begun to write and, while working as a tutor near Bordeaux, was preparing a book of “Minor Poems—in Minor Keys—by a Minor,” which was never published. His early influences included the Bible and the Romantic poets, particularly John Keats.

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In 1915 Owen enlisted in the British army. The experience of trench warfare brought him to rapid maturity; the poems written after January 1917 are full of anger at war’s brutality, an elegiac pity for “those who die as cattle,” and a rare descriptive power.

He fell into a shell hole and suffered concussion; he was blown up by a trench mortar and spent several days unconscious on an embankment lying amongst the remains of one of his fellow officers. Soon afterward, Owen was diagnosed as suffering from neurasthenia or shell shock and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh for treatment. There he met the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who shared his feelings about the war and who became interested in his work. Reading Sassoon’s poems and discussing his work with Sassoon revolutionized Owen’s style and his conception of poetry. Despite the plans of well-wishers to find him a staff job, he returned to France in August 1918 as a company commander. He was awarded the Military Cross in October and was killed exactly a week before Armistice Day.

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Robert Graves and Sacheverell Sitwell (who also personally knew him) stated that Owen was homosexual, and homoeroticism is a central element in much of Owen's poetry.

Throughout Owen's lifetime, homosexual activity between men was a punishable offence in British law, and the account of Owen's sexual development has been somewhat obscured because his brother Harold removed what he considered discreditable passages in Owen's letters and diaries after the death of their mother.

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Famous works:

Dulce et Decorum est

Insensibility

Anthem for Doomed Youth

Futility

Spring Offensive

Strange Meeting

“So often, a visit to a bookshop has cheered me, and reminded me that there are good things in the world.”