ABSTRACT
England in June 1917. He was treated at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh. This period of Owen’s life has been fictionalized by Pat BARKER in a trilogy that eventually won her the Booker Prize. At Craiglockhart, Owen met the poet Siegfried SASSOON who encouraged him to work on his poetry. When Owen was discharged from Craiglockhart, Sassoon gave him a letter of introduction to London’s literary circles where he met Oscar WILDE’S friend Robert Ross, the poet Osbert Sitwell, and others. When Sassoon returned wounded from the front in 1918, Owen felt he should take his place. He was posted back to France in August 1918 where he was killed in action, leading his men across the Sambre Canal, a week before the Armistice was signed. He was awarded the Military Cross posthumously for leadership. During his lifetime only five of his poems were published. His poetry, most of which was written between the summer of 1917 and the autumn of the following year, makes him one of the outstanding war poets of his generation, though his reputation was slow to grow. His work was first collected in 1920 by Sassoon. Much of it celebrates and mourns the beauty of dead young men. Owen wrote about the waste of young men’s lives during the war, combining homoeroticism with acute observations of the horror of trench warfare. Benjamin Britten used some of his poems for his War Requiem, which was made into a film by Derek JARMAN in 1988. C.Day Lewis edited Owen’s collected poems in 1967. In 1974 Jon Stallworthy published his biography and in 1985 Stallworthy edited a further edition of Owen’s poems. His work is now routinely taught in schools and universities.
