United Kingdom
Wilfred Owen
1893–1918 Poet and infantry officer
Owen, a railwayman's son from Shropshire, enlisted in 1915 and went to France in December 1916. After months in the line, he was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh in 1917, suffering from shell shock. There he met Siegfried Sassoon, who encouraged his poems and showed him how to write unsentimentally about the realities of war. In the year that followed he wrote almost all the poems for which he is remembered, among them 'Anthem for Doomed Youth', 'Strange Meeting' and 'Dulce et Decorum Est'. Only five of his poems appeared in his lifetime. He returned to the front, won the Military Cross, and was killed on 4 November 1918 at the Sambre-Oise Canal. His mother received the telegram on Armistice Day.