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Thank you Mark will be going in November before going to Belgium for Remembrance Day.
The eldest son of a railway clerk, Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born in Oswestry in 1893 and grew up in Birkenhead and Shrewsbury. An early interest in poetry was encouraged by his ambitious and possesive mother who was a devout evangelical Anglican (his father was disappointed that Wilfred did not seem likely to take up a trade), and he absorbed the works of Shakespeare and Romantic poets such as Keats, before starting to write poetry himself.
When, in 1912, Wilfred failed to win a scolarship to London University he became an unpaid lay assistant in the parish of Dunsden near Reading. Sadly, he did not receive the tuition he had hoped would enable him to make a second attempt at winning a scholarship; and it wasn't long before he resigned his post and rejected his orthodox beliefs.
In 1913 he travelled to Bordeaux and took a poorly paid job teaching English in the Berlitz School. This led to a private tutoring post in the Pyranees, where he met the poet Laurent Tailhade who encouraged him to continue writing. When war was declared he was indecisive about returning to England because of the supposed dangers of crossing the Channel during wartime.
However, he eventually made his way back in September 1915 and promptly enlisted in the Artists' Rifles, where he met Harold Monro, in whose Poetry Bookshop Wilfred spent many happy hours (he also took lodgings there); and some months after being comissioned in the Manchester Regiment, Wilfred was shipped over to France, where in early 1917 he joined the 2nd Manchesters on the Somme.
Trench warfare affected Wilfred and his poetry profoundly. Upon arrival, one of his first tasks was to hold a dugout in No-Man's-Land (an ordeal he described in his poems The Sentry and Exposure) - this and experiences like it hardened up his poetry and injected it with realism. He took as his subject the 'the pity of War' and began to write about the harsh conditions and suffering of the individual soldier, often with homoerotic intensity. It was at about this time that he wrote, "Above all I am not concerned with poetry. My subject is war, and the pity of war. The Poetry is in the pity... All the Poet can do is warn. That is why true poets must be truthful."
