Wilfred Edward Salter Owen (1893 - 1918) was an English soldier and one of the First World War's leading poets, renowned for his shocking and brutal accounts of the realities of warfare. His mentor and friend, Siegfried Sassoon, was another prominent war poet who also dramatically departed from the prevailing romanticized perceptions of war and the patriotic verse of earlier poets. In his introduction to Owen's posthumous collection, Poems (1919), Sassoon wrote:
"I can only affirm that he was a man of absolute integrity of mind. He never wrote his poems (as so many war-poets did) to make the effect of a personal gesture. He pitied others; he did not pity himself. In the last year of his life he attained a clear vision of what he needed to say, and these poems survive him as his true and splendid testament."
Owen was born in Oswestry and educated at the Birkenhead Institute. He attended London University in 1910 and was later tutored near Bordeaux, where he met the French poet Laurent Tailhade, who encouraged his writing. Owen joined the Artists' Rifles Officers' Training Corps and served with the 2nd Battalion in France from December 1916 to June 1917. After returning home for treatment (notably at Craiglockhart War Hospital), he rejoined the same Battalion fourteen months later, eventually becoming its company commander. He received the Military Cross for gallantry on October 1, 1918, and was killed in action on November 4, while attempting to lead his men across the Sambre Canal.
Anthem for Doomed Youth and Strange Meeting are particularly representative of his powerful work. As Owen himself wrote in the preface to his planned collection (published posthumously in Poems):
"This book is not about heroes... Above all, this book is not concerned with Poetry. The subject of it is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."