Biography Essay

Wilfred Owen, who wrote some of the best British poetry on World War I, composed nearly all of his poems in slightly more than a year, from August 1917 to September 1918. In November 1918 he was killed in action at the age of twenty-five, one week before the Armistice. Only five poems were published in his lifetime-three in the Nation and two that appeared anonymously in the Hydra, a journal he edited in 1917 when he was a patient at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh. Shortly after his death, seven more of his poems appeared in the 1919 volume of Edith Sitwell's annual anthology, Wheels, a volume dedicated to his memory, and in 1919 and 1920 seven other poems appeared in periodicals. Almost all of Owen's poems, therefore, appeared posthumously: Poems (1920), edited by Siegfried Sassoon with the assistance of Edith Sitwell, contains twenty-three poems; The Poems of Wilfred Owen (1931), edited by Edmund...