Doomed Youth
...Horace, and one which was taken as a veritable truth by virtually every man, woman and child in the early years of twentieth century Britain.
The memories of Britain’s last conflict, the Boer War, had faded. Victoria’s reign was over and a more frivolous society began to emerge under the reign of Edward VII, and continued when George V succeeded him in 1910. The country was at peace and life was good.
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born in Oswestry, Shropshire in March 1893. Shortly after his birth, the family fortunes took a downward turn, on the death of his maternal grandfather, Edward Shaw, who had been Mayor of Oswestry. After his death, Shaw was discovered to have been bankrupt, and the Owen family, who had been living in his house, were forced to move to more modest lodgings. Birkenhead in Cheshire became home to the infant Owen, and his mother determined that her son would, in time, restore the family’s prosperity and gentility.
Owen began writing poems at the age of ten, having fallen under the spell of the poetry of Keats, who was to remain a major influence on his work.
On leaving school in 1911, Wilfred Owen took up a post as lay assistant to the vicar of Dunsden in Oxfordshire. He became critical of the role of the Church in society. His writings of that time show an increasing awareness of the sufferings of the poor, and the awakening of the compassion which is a characteristic of the poems he wrote on the Western Front.
During the first few weeks of 1913, Owen suffered a crisis of faith. He realised that literature meant more to him than religion, and he left Dunsden on the verge of a nervous breakdown. During his period of recovery that summer, he became interested in the archaeological remains of the Roman city of Uriconium. In one of his early poems, Uriconium, an Ode, he displays his first awareness of the...
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