Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen is widely regarded as the greatest poet of the First World War and one of the most important voices in twentieth-century English literature. Born in 1893 in Oswestry, Shropshire, he enlisted in the Artists' Rifles in 1915 and served as an officer on the Western Front, where he experienced the horrors of trench warfare first-hand. His poetry, including iconic works such as Dulce et Decorum Est, Anthem for Doomed Youth, and Strange Meeting, transformed the way war was written about in English, replacing the patriotic rhetoric of earlier poets with unflinching depictions of suffering, futility, and the devastating physical and psychological costs of combat. His famous preface declared that his subject was war and the pity of war, and that the poetry was in the pity. Owen was profoundly influenced by his friendship with Siegfried Sassoon, whom he met while both were being treated for shell shock at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh. He returned to the front in 1918 and was killed in action on 4 November, just one week before the Armistice. He was twenty-five years old. The collection The Great Poets: The War Poetry of Wilfred Owen gathers his most powerful work in both book and audiobook formats, with the audiobook bringing his verse to listeners with the emotional immediacy that his words demand. Owen's poetry remains essential reading and listening, a permanent testament to the human cost of war.