Welcome to the deep dive. I want you to imagine
for a moment that you spend your life creating
something so profoundly moving. Truly revolutionary.
Yeah, revolutionary. Something that permanently
changes how society views an entire concept,
a concept as massive as war. Right. But the catch
is you die just days before the world ever realizes
you're genius. Sounds like the plot of a film.
But for the subject of today's deep dive, it
was harsh reality. It was indeed. Today we are
looking at a comprehensive biographical and historical
text on the English poet and soldier Wilfred
Owen. Yes. And the mission of our deep dive today
is to really explore how a young man with basically
no money for university became the definitive
piercing voice of the First World War. We're
going to see how trauma, a faithful friendship,
and a hidden identity shaped his timeless art.
It is a remarkable journey we have ahead of us
today because this isn't just, you know, a dry
recounting of history. It is really a story about
the violent collision of these grand romantic
ideals with the gritty horrific reality of the
trenches. It's about how experiencing the worst
of humanity can sometimes forge an artistic voice
that echoes for generations. If you look at the
letters provided in our source material, you
can actually trace the exact week. His tone changes
from arrogant snobbery to total psychological
devastation. OK, let's unpack this, starting
right at the beginning. Right. Wilfred Edward
Salter was born in March 1893 up in Shropshire.
At first, things were relatively comfortable
for his family. They lived in a nice house owned
by his grandfather. But that didn't last. No,
it didn't. When his grandfather died in January
1897, the house was sold. The family's financial
situation took a really severe hit. They ended
up moving frequently, lodging in the back streets
of Birkenhead while his father worked for a railway
company, and later moving to Shrewsbury. And
that financial struggle is crucial to understanding
his early trajectory. Because he was smart. Incredibly
bright. In 1911, he actually passed the matriculation
exam for the University of London. But there's
a catch. Yeah, he didn't get the first -class
honors required to secure a scholarship, and
a scholarship was literally the only way he could
have afforded to attend university. Wow. It was
a massive closed door. It left him scrambling
for a way to continue his intellectual life.
So instead of going off to university, the sources
show he ends up working as a lay assistant to
the vicar of Dunstan near Reading. Yes. He got
free lodging and some tuition for the entrance
exam in exchange for his work. But this period
from September 1911 to February 1913, it really
shifted his worldview, didn't it? It did. And
in a way that planted the seeds for his later
poetry, his time at the Dunstan Parish led to
a really profound disillusionment with the church.
Because he was dealing with actual poverty. Exactly.
He wasn't just doing administrative work. He
was dealing directly with the rural poor. He
became heavily disillusioned with the ceremony
of the church when contrasted with its total
failure to actually provide material aid for
those starving parishioners. This questioning
of faith and institutional failure is a theme
that would heavily seep into his later war poetry.
He would eventually go as far as to write poems
commenting on the crucifixion of Christ, claiming
that the love of God seemed dying in the mud
of France. Before the war though, His early poetic
influences were deeply rooted in the Romantics.
Oh, absolutely. If you read his early drafts,
he is heavily channeling John Keats and Percy
Bish Shelley. Very floral, beautiful imagery.
Very traditional. Yeah. He actually discovered
his poetic vocation around 1904 during a childhood
holiday in Cheshire. But fast forward a bit to
1913, and he is working as a private tutor teaching
English and French in Bordeaux, France. Which
is an interesting detail. It is. When the First
World War broke out, he didn't rush to enlist
right away. In fact, he even considered joining
the French army because he felt so culturally
tied to the country. I mean, have you ever had
a life plan completely derailed like missing
out on university only to find it sets the stage
for an unexpected greater calling? That's a great
question. The transition from a young tutor reading
Keats in a French villa to a soldier enduring
gas warfare is just jarring. Completely. And
the sources point out that his return to England
wasn't driven by some sudden burst of jingoistic
fervor. It was a slow build of societal pressure,
a sense of duty, and perhaps a bit of guilt watching
others go. By October 1915, he enlisted in the
artist's rifles, and by June 1916, he was commissioned
as a second lieutenant in the Manchester regiment.
I was reading the excerpts from his letters home
during this period, and there is a really surprising
detail. The snobbery. Yes. When he first took
command, Owen was quite the snob. In a letter
to his mother, he described his own troops, the
men he was leading, as expressionless lumps.
Expressionless lumps. Yeah, he seemed to hold
them in contempt for what he called their loudish
behavior. He was very much playing the part of
the refined, educated officer looking down on
the working class enlisted men. But that initial
arrogance, that class -based distance he tried
to keep from his men, it was shattered almost
immediately upon reaching the front lines in
France. The reality hit hard. Very hard. The
source details specific, horrific experiences
that broke down those barriers. First, he fell
into a deep shell hole in the dark and suffered
a severe concussion. Which is terrifying enough.
Right. But shortly after returning to the line,
in an even more traumatic event, he was caught
in the blast of a trench mortar shell. He spent
several days lying semi -conscious on a railway
embankment. pinned down by enemy fire. Oh my
God. And he was right amongst the scattered remains
of a fellow officer. Just the sensory overload
and the pure psychological terror of that are
hard to even fathom. The military at the time
barely understood that toll. They slapped the
label neurasthenia on it, which is the medical
term for what we now call shell shock, and he
was removed from the front lines. They shipped
him to Craig Lockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh
for treatment. And what's fascinating here is
how this psychological breaking point, this diagnosis
of shell shock, was actually the catalyst for
his true creative genius to emerge. It really
was. Craig Lockhart wasn't just a hospital. It
was an incubator. because it's at Craig Lockhart
where the most pivotal encounter of his life
happens. He meets a fellow patient, the already
established poet Siegfried Sassoon. A huge moment.
Owen, completely hero worshipped him. The source
notes that Owen told his mother he was not worthy
to light his pipe. He even wrote to Sassoon saying,
you have fixed my life however short. The dynamic
between them was incredibly fruitful. But we
also have to credit Owen's doctor at Craig Lockhart,
Arthur Brock. Dr. Brock practiced something called
ergotherapy, or a work cure. Work cure, right.
As part of his treatment, Brock encouraged Owen
to translate his trauma, specifically the terrifying
visual experiences he was reliving in his nightmares,
directly into poetry. So he couldn't run from
it. Exactly. Instead of avoiding the memories,
he had to face them on the page. Sassoon, who
was being influenced by early Freudian psychoanalysis
through his own doctor, aided Owen in this process.
Sassoon showed Owen, by example, what poetry
could actually do when applied to modern warfare.
Sassoon essentially taught him how to use realism
and satire. Up until this point, Owen's style
was still heavily influenced by those romantic
notions of honor and beauty. Teets and Shelley.
Yeah. But Sassoon's emphasis was on writing from
direct brutal experience. He taught Owen to focus
on gritty realism to shock the civilian population
out of their complacency. And that is the alchemy
of Wilfred Owen's work. He didn't just become
a Sassoon clone. He took Sassoon's gritty realism
and fused it with his own romantic sensibilities
and immense technical skill. Right. The synthesis
created a poetic voice that was intensely potent,
highly visual and deeply sympathetic. It's a
style beautifully summarized by Owen's own ficus
phrase describing his subject matter, the pity
of war. Here's where it gets really interesting.
Owen eventually surpassed his mentor technically.
Sassoon's poetry was amazing at delivering a
blunt satirical punch, but Owen started experimenting
extensively with innovative poetic techniques
that changed English literature. The source highlights
his use of something called pararyme and his
heavy reliance on assonance. Which requires a
bit of explanation for those of us who haven't
sat in a literature seminar recently. Please
do. Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds
to create a mood. But pararyme, which Owen pioneered
the heavy use of, is when the consonants match
but the vowels don't. So instead of a perfect
satisfying rhyme like cat and hat you rhyme flush
with flash or groined with groaned Right and
the text points out how brilliant this was for
his subject matter by using para rhyme He deliberately
denies the reader the comfort and resolution
of a perfect rhyme. Yes, it creates this unsettling
incomplete dissonant sound When you read a poem
like Strange Meeting, the rhyming of escaped
and scooped literally sounds like the broken,
jarring reality of the war itself. The language
is musically reflecting the trauma. It is brilliant
structural engineering in his poetry. And it's
important to note that while his artistic life
was expanding at Craig Lockhart, his personal
life was experiencing a parallel awakening. This
is a huge part of the story. Through Sassoon,
Owen was introduced to a sophisticated homosexual
literary circle. This network included Robbie
Ross, who was famously a loyal friend and literary
executor for Oscar Wilde, as well as the writer
Osbert Sitwell and CK Scott Moncrief, the Scottish
writer who would go on to translate Marcel Proust.
I was really struck by how massive this exposure
was for him. coming from somewhat sheltered religious
background, meeting this group broadened his
worldview significantly. It did. This introduction
to a supportive literary and artistic circle
gave Owen the confidence he needed to incorporate
homoerotic elements into his own work. People
who knew him intimately, like Robert Graves and
Cheverell Sitwell, firmly believed Owen was homosexual
and that homoeroticism was a central driving
element in much of his poetry. Right. The biographer
Andrew Motion noted that Sassoon's homosexuality
admitted Owen to a style of living and thinking
that he found naturally sympathetic. It allowed
him to write about the physical bodies of his
fellow soldiers with a deep, tender intimacy
that contrasted sharply with the mechanized slaughter
around them. But the sources reveal a really
tragic layer to this part of his life. During
Owen's lifetime and for decades afterward, homosexual
activity between men was a heavily punished criminal
offense in the United Kingdom. Yes. Because of
this, his posthumous legacy was severely censored.
His own brother, Harold, was named his literary
executor and went to great lengths to construct
a sanitized image of Wilfred. It's terrible to
read about. Harold literally took a penknife
to Owen's private diaries and letters, scraping
away words, crossing out names, and removing
any passages he considered discreditable to obscure
the account of his brother's sexual development.
And this academic and familial suppression wasn't
just a brief hiccup. It lasted for the majority
of the 20th century. It wasn't until 1987 that
a major turning point occurred in Owen's scholarship.
1987. Yeah. An article called The Truth Untold
by Jonathan Cutbill was published in the New
Statesman. Cutbill aggressively attacked this
ongoing academic suppression of Owen as a poet
of homosexual experience. The details in that
article recontextualized things that had been
hiding in plain sight. For example, it revealed
that a poem of Owens called Shadwell Stare, which
mainstream academics had previously dismissed
as just a mysterious atmospheric piece, was actually
a straightforward elegy to homosexual soliciting.
Exactly. Shadwell Stare was an area of the London
docks that was widely renowned as a cruising
ground. It just shows how easily academics can
miss the truth when they are looking through
the lens of a preconceived myth. They were so
invested in the image of the pious, tragic war
hero that they assumed the poem was a gothic
ghost story. They entirely ignored the lived
reality of the man writing it. It reminds us
how much of the person's truth can be erased
by history when society deems it unacceptable.
But Owen himself was intensely committed to truth,
particularly the unvarnished truth of his era,
which brings us to the events of 1918. Let's
sit the scene based on the timeline in the text.
It's the summer of 1918. Sassoon has been shot
in the head in an apparent friendly fire incident,
and he is sent back to England unsickly for the
rest of the war. Meanwhile, Owen is safely stationed
on home duty in Yorkshire. He could have stayed
there indefinitely. The military considered him
fit for home service. But he makes the monumental
decision that he must return to the front line
in France. He saw it as a terrible, unavoidable
duty. With Sassoon incapacitated and back in
England, Owen felt he had to carry the torch.
He had to be the witness. Exactly. He needed
to ensure that the horrific realities of the
war would continue to be reported to the public
by someone who was actually in the mud. He felt
a profound obligation to the men who were still
out there fighting and dying. He couldn't abide
the thought of writing about their suffering
from the safety of an English drawing room. When
you read about Sassoon's reaction, It is intense.
Sassoon was furious when he found out about this
idea. He violently opposed Owen going back to
the trenches. He famously threatened to stab
him in the leg if he even tried to return. A
very Sassoon thing to say. Yeah. Because of this
fierce opposition, Owen actually kept his deployment
a secret. He didn't inform Sassoon that he was
returning to active service until he was already
physically back in France, beyond Sassoon's reach.
Once back at the front, Owen proved his courage
in a way that is almost hard to reconcile with
his earlier shell shock. On October 1st, 1918,
he led units of the 2nd Manchester's to storm
several German strong points near the village
of Jeancourt. Right. His company commander became
a casualty, so Owen assumed command. The military
records state he showed fine leadership, resisted
a heavy counterattack, and personally manipulated
a captured enemy machine gun from an isolated
position, inflicting considerable losses on the
enemy. And for this action, he was awarded the
Military Cross. But the text makes an incredibly
heartbreaking point about why he wanted that
medal. Yes. He specifically sought out this award
in order to justify himself as a war poet. He
knew that a pacifist poet without a medal would
be easily dismissed by the public as a coward,
but a decorated officer with a military cross.
That is a prophet they're forced to listen to.
It's a powerful motivation. He felt he needed
the ultimate military validation so the public
at home would read his poetry about the horrors
of the war and actually believe him. It is a
devastating commentary on the society at the
time, that a poet felt he had to prove his bravery
by participating in the slaughter just to earn
the right to speak out against it. And then the
timeline delivers a staggering blow. On November
4th, 1918, Wilfred Owen is killed in action during
the crossing of the Sambreois Canal. He was just
25 years old. So young. This happened exactly
one week, almost to the hour before the signing
of the armistice, which ended the war. The cruelty
of that timing is immense, but the way his family
received the news is even worse. His mother,
Susan, was handed the telegram informing her
of his death on Armistice Day itself. Unbelievable.
She read the news of her son's death at the exact
moment the church bells in Shrewsbury were ringing
out in joyous celebration of the war ending.
So what does this all mean? How do we measure
the impact of a life cut so incredibly short?
We see in the sources that his legacy wasn't
actually universally praised at first. That is
correct. It is important to acknowledge the literary
naysayers of the time. The most prominent was
the famous poet William Butler Yeats. Yeats aggressively
excluded Owen from the Oxford Book of Modern
Verse. He was brutal in his assessment, describing
Owen's work as all blood, dirt, and sucked sugar
stick. Yates belonged to an older, more romantic
tradition. He argued that in great poetry, a
tragedy should be a joy to the man who dies,
and that passive suffering is not a subject for
poetry. Which completely misses the point. The
blood and dirt was exactly the point Owen was
trying to make. He wanted you to feel the suffocation
of a gas attack, so you wouldn't glorify the
conflict. Thankfully, Yates' view did not win
out in the long run. Owen's legacy is massive
and enduring. Very much so. He was heavily championed
by Sassoon, who made sure his works were collected
and printed, as well as the poet Edith Sitwell.
Yes, his work eventually achieved widespread
acclaim and became the standard by which all
war poetry is judged. In 1985, he was one of
16 great war poets commemorated on a slate stone
unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poets Corner.
A huge honor. His poetry also served as the foundational
text for Benjamin Britten's famous War Requiem,
which was first performed in 1962 to consecrate
the new Coventry Cathedral. I was looking at
the publication dates in our sources, and it
blew my mind to realize only five of his poems
were published while he was alive, and one of
those was just a fragment. Just five. He had
plans for a whole volume of verse, had even written
a preface for it declaring my subject as war
and the pity of war, but he never lived to see
it published. Yet despite that— he became the
defining voice of an entire generation. It is
a profound legacy, and I want to leave you with
a final lingering thought to mull over today,
something we haven't touched on yet regarding
how he is remembered. When his mother, Susan,
was tasked with choosing the inscription for
his gravestone in northern France, she selected
a line from one of his own poems, The End. The
line she chose reads, Shall life renew these
bodies? Of a truth, all death will he annul.
But if you look at Owen's original manuscript,
That line ended with a question mark, all death
will heed it all. It was a profound expression
of theological doubt. By intentionally deleting
that trailing question mark for the gravestone,
she transformed his aggrazing question into a
definitive statement of faith. That is such a
striking paradox. His family desperately tried
to edit out his doubts in his authentic self
to make him fit their ideal mold. Yet it is exactly
his raw, uncensored, un -pious honesty about
the realities of human suffering that made his
work immortal. He refused to look away from the
ugly truth in his poetry, even while his loved
ones tried to soften the complex truth of the
man himself after he was gone. Thank you so much
for joining us on this deep dive into the life
and mind of Wilfred Owen. Carry that thought
with you and we will see you next time.