Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen MC (born March 18, 1893 in Oswestry , Shropshire ( England ), † November 4, 1918 in Ors ( France )) was a British poet and soldier. He is considered the most important contemporary witness of the First World War in English literature . Some of his most famous works today were only published after his death. The preface he wrote to the collection of his poems, which was due to appear in 1919, contains several expressions that went down as idioms in the English language, including War, and the pity of War and The Poetry is in the pity (“Poetry is in compassion”, cf. the later “writing out of concern ”).

Life

The early years

Owen was the oldest of four children in a family of Anglo- Welsh descent. His parents, Tom, a railroad worker, and Susan Owen lived in an affluent house that belonged to his grandfather. After his death in 1897 they had to rent a furnished apartment in a poor residential area of Birkenhead . Wilfred Owen attended the Birkenhead Institute and Shrewsbury Technical School here. During a vacation stay in Cheshire in 1903 or 1904 he discovered his poetic talent. He received an Anglican upbringing at the Protestant schools ; Among the first influences were John Keats and, as with many of his contemporaries, the Bible .

Shortly after leaving school in 1911, Owen passed the entrance exam and was enrolled at the University of London , but his exam result was not enough for a scholarship . In exchange for free accommodation and help with exam preparation, he worked as a lay helper for the Vicar of Dunsden and as a school intern at Wyle Cop School. He then studied botany and later, at the instigation of the English faculty at the University College of Reading, today's University of Reading , also Old English , without having to pay the tuition fees. Since he had unsuccessfully applied for a scholarship again, he had to continue studying here. Before the outbreak of war he worked as a private teacher for English at the Berlitz school in Bordeaux .

military service

On October 21, 1915, Owen joined the Artists' Rifles , a volunteer unit for the British Army . For the next seven months he was trained at Hare Hall Camp, Essex . In January 1917 he was posted to the Manchester Regiment as a second lieutenant . After traumatic experiences - he led his platoon into battle and was buried in a shell hole for three days - he was diagnosed with war trauma and sent to the hospital in Edinburgh for treatment . While he was recovering there, he met the poet Siegfried Sassoon .

In July 1918, Owen returned to France to serve in the war, although he could have remained in the home service until further notice. His decision to do so was based almost entirely on Sassoon's return to England; after being shot in the head from within the ranks , it was written unfit for service until the end of the war. Owen saw it as his patriotic duty to take Sassoon's place on the front lines to bear witness to the atrocities of war. Sassoon strongly disagreed with this plan and threatened Owen to stab him in the leg if he should only try. So Owen did not teach his friend until he had already left for France.

death

Grave of Wilfred Owen

After returning to the front, Owen led Second Manchester units on October 1, 1918, storming enemy bases near the village of Joncourt and was awarded the Military Cross for his conduct . It fell almost to the hour exactly a week before the armistice south of Ors on the Canal de la Sambre à l'Oise during the Second Battle of the Sambre . He was posthumously awarded the Military Cross for his bravery and leadership of the operation. When the news of his death reached his home, the town's church bells were ringing the peace agreement.

plant

Literary work

Owen is considered the most outstanding war poet in the English language. It was in stark contrast to the public perception of war as well as the patriotic- affirmative war poetry that poets like Rupert Brooke wrote, although they had no experience of the battlefield. His relentlessly realistic portrayal of the horrors of trench warfare and gas warfare was heavily influenced by his friend, the poet Siegfried Sassoon, as his most famous poems Dulce et Decorum Est and Anthem for Doomed Youth show immediately. Copies of his manuscripts have been preserved with Sassoon's handwritten notes. Owen's poetry is now more widely recognized than that of his mentor. Although he was not the only lyric poet of his era to use consonance , he was the most inventive and, in some of his poems, the most ingenious use of this stylistic device and at the same time the first to deal with it in detail.

Owen's poetry changed significantly in 1917. During the course of therapy in Craiglockhart, his doctor Arthur Brock encouraged him to work through his experiences and especially the nightmares that resulted from them poetically. Sassoon supported him and showed him the expressive possibilities of poetry using literary examples. His use of satirical stylistic devices exerted an influence on Owen, who now tried to imitate Sassoon's style. Undoubtedly the subject of Owen's poetry changed as a result of the collaboration. Sassoon's advocacy of realism and “writing as an experience report” was known to Owen, but he had never used it before; until then his work had mainly comprised a series of light-hearted sonnets . Sassoon promoted Owen by spreading the seals beyond his death; he was one of its first editors. Nevertheless, Owen's poetry has its own distinctive character traits, so that today he surpasses Sassoon's fame as a poet.

effect

The war poetry of this era enjoyed little recognition. During his lifetime Owen, although he intended to publish a volume of poetry and had already written a preface for it , did not publish anything with the exception of a few poems in The Hydra , the hospital journal of Craiglockhart which he oversees; only five poems appeared here, one of them in fragments . Sassoon's influence as well as Edith Sitwell's support and the new publication of Owen's poems in an anthology published by Edmund Blunden in 1931 cemented his fame; in the 1960s, a renewed engagement with his work also contributed to bringing the poet into public interest. Owen's complete works appeared in the unabridged original version in 1994 in the two-volume edition The Complete Poems and Fragments by Jon Stallworthy.

In 1975 his sister-in-law donated all the manuscripts, photographs and letters from the property of her deceased husband, Owen's brother Harold, to the library at the University of Oxford's English Faculty . In addition to the poet's personal effects, this also includes his books and an almost complete collection of The Hydra . The estate is open to the public.

The relationship with Siegfried Sassoon

A central part of Owen's poetry is his homosexuality . Owen's respect for Siegfried Sassoon bordered on hero worship; He told his mother that he was “not worth lighting his pipe”. When Sassoon decided to return to the front lines, he was devastated, even though he had left Craiglockhart before he did. He was stationed in Scarborough for home service for several months , during which he joined the circle of witty homosexual writers that Sassoon had introduced him to. Members included Oscar Wilde's former lover Robert Baldwin Ross and Robert Graves , poet and writer Osbert Sitwell, and Proust translator Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff . Here he also met HG Wells and Arnold Bennett and developed his personal style. These acquaintances broadened his awareness and encouraged him to give homoerotic elements a place in his work.

Owen's sexual development was covered up by his brother Harold, who, in his opinion, removed offensive letters and diary passages after her mother's death. Harold Owen is also responsible for ensuring that the commendation for his brother's war award was retrospectively changed so that it appeared less "warlike" and more in line with the image of a sensitive "peace poet". Wilfred himself asked his mother to burn a sack of personal papers in the event of his death, which she did. His early biographers did the rest to keep Owen's sexual orientation a secret.

Monuments

Owen's grave is in the Ors Community Cemetery . Memorials to him can be found in Gailly, Ors, Oswestry and Shrewsbury. A museum commemorating Owen and Sassoon is housed in a Napier University building in Edinburgh.

Owen is hardly known in France. The Ors media library bears his name; Every year the British and French celebrate a joint commemoration here on the day of his death. A British and a French association are dedicated to researching and disseminating his work. The Maison Forestière Owen was set up as a memorial in 2011 at the Bois-l'Évêque forester's lodge - where Owen spent the night before his death and wrote his last letter to his mother .

Reception in literature and music

The internationally best known use of Wilfred Owen's poems is Benjamin Britten's War Requiem (1961)

In 1952 Rudolf George Escher set Strange meeting to music for baritone and piano

Stephen MacDonald's drama Not About Heroes (1982) describes the friendship between Sassoon and Owen that begins in Craiglockhart

The band 10,000 Maniacs recorded the poem Dulce et Decorum Est under the title The Latin One on the album Secrets of the I Ching (1983) . On Human Conflict Number Five (1982) there is an adaptation of Anthem For Doomed Youth under the same song title

Pat Barker's historical novel Niemandsland (original title: Regeneration , 1991, ISBN 3-423-12622-1 ) deals primarily with Siegfried Sassoon and his doctor WHR Rivers, but also describes the relationship with Owen from the perspective of the elder and his influence on the poet as well as his therapy by Arthur Brock. Both meet Robert Graves there as well . Sequels: The Eye in the Door (OT: The Eye in the Door , 1993, ISBN 3-423-12800-3 ) and The Street of the Ghosts (OT: The Ghost Road , 1995, ISBN 3-423-13005-9 )

Sarah McLachlan's album title Fumbling Towards Ecstasy (1993) is based on a line from Owen's poem Dulce et Decorum Est

Owen is the lyrical me in the song Owen's Lament on the album Sunset Studies (2000) by the Australian rock band Augie March

Part of the poem Greater Love is reproduced at the end of Pity of War (2003) by hip-hop group Jedi Mind Tricks

Bruce Dickinson quotes the first verse of the poem Anthem for Doomed Youth as an introduction to the piece Paschendale on Iron Maiden's live album Death on the Road (2005)

Susan Hill's novel Strange Meeting is named after Owen's poem of the same name

Brian Patten's poem Sleep Now is dedicated to Owen.

swell

^ London Gazette (Supplement). No. 31480, HMSO, London, July 30, 1919, p. 9761 ( PDF , accessed October 2, 2013, English).

Work edition

Poems . Bilingual. Translated, with an introduction and comments by Joachim Utz. Second, expanded edition. Mattes Verlag, Heidelberg 2014, ISBN 978-3-86809-091-8
Strange encounter. Poems in German / English. From the English and with an afterword by Johannes CS Frank. Hochrot Verlag Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-902871-25-1
The wretchedness of war. The war poems by Wilfred Owens bilingual. From the English and with an afterword by Johannes CS Frank. Publishing house J. Frank | Berlin, ISBN 978-3-940249-55-5

literature

Jon Stallworthy: Wilfred Owen , London: Oxford Univ. Pr. [U. a.], 1974, ISBN 0-19-211719-X
Dominic Hibberd: Wilfred Owen: a new biography , London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002, ISBN 0-297-82945-9
Harry Ricketts: Strange Meetings - The Poets of the Great War , Chatto & Windus, London, 2010. ISBN 978-0-701-17271-8
Guy Cuthbertson: Wilfred Owen , New Haven [et al. a.]: Yale Univ. Press, 2014, ISBN 978-0-300-15300-2

Web links

Commons : Wilfred Owen - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Wikisource: Wilfred Owen - Sources and full texts (English)

personal data
SURNAME	Owen, Wilfred
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Owen, Wilfred Edward Salter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	English poet
DATE OF BIRTH	March 18, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH	Oswestry , Shropshire
DATE OF DEATH	November 4, 1918
Place of death	Ors , France

[1] London Gazette (Supplement). No. 31480, HMSO, London, July 30, 1919, p. 9761 ( PDF , accessed October 2, 2013, English).