Wilfred Owen

by Guy Cuthbertson

One of Britain’s best-known and most loved poets, Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) was killed at age 25 on one of the last days of the First World War, having acted heroically as soldier and officer despite his famous misgivings about the war's rationale and conduct. He left behind a body of poetry that sensitively captured the pity, rage, valor, and futility of the conflict.

In this new biography Guy Cuthbertson provides a fresh account of Owen's life and formative the lower-middle-class childhood that he tried to escape; the places he lived in, from Birkenhead to Bordeaux; his class anxieties and his religious doubts; his sexuality and friendships; his close relationship with his mother and his childlike personality. Cuthbertson chronicles a great poet's growth to poetic maturity, illuminates the social strata of the extraordinary Edwardian era, and adds rich context to how Owen's enduring verse can be understood.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History, World War I, Poetry

346 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Guy Cuthbertson is Professor of British Literature and Culture, and Head of the School of Humanities at Liverpool Hope University. He was the British Academy's Chatterton Lecturer on Poetry in 2018.

He grew up in the Midlands and studied at St Andrews University and The Queen’s College, Oxford University. He has held academic posts at the universities of Oxford, St Andrews, Swansea, Brighton and London.

His most recent book, Peace at Last, was published by Yale University Press in October 2018. It was ‘Book of the Week’ in The Evening Standard, included in the Daily Telegraph‘s ‘Books of the Year’, and included in the ‘Best Books of 2018’ in Gulf News.

‘[a] brilliant portrayal of Britain on the day that peace broke out; when people could believe there was an end to the war to end all wars. He weaves a wonderful tapestry of the mood and events across the country, drawing on a wide range of local and regional newspapers. It is accessible history at its best. […] outstanding […] wonderfully stimulating’ (The Evening Standard, 8 November)

‘In his absorbing and well-researched study, Mr. Cuthbertson, a professor of literature at Liverpool Hope University, shows how a day of spontaneity was tamed over time, as celebration morphed into commemoration. […] “Peace at Last,” despite its sometimes grim subject, is a pleasure to read and is full of fascinating tidbits.’ (The Wall Street Journal, 12 November)

Guy is a General Editor of the six-volume scholarly edition of Edward Thomas’s prose, published by Oxford University Press. His edition of Edward Thomas’s Autobiographies was a ‘Book of the Year’ in The Times Literary Supplement.

His biography of Wilfred Owen was published by Yale University Press in 2014 and in paperback in 2015. It was named as one of the Top Ten Biographies of the Year by Booklist in the USA, and chosen as a Book of the Year by the New Zealand Book Council, and in the UK it was a ‘Book of the Week’, a ‘Must Read’ and the subject of the lead review in several newspapers and magazines.

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am certain that this is not the best biography of Owen around, but it is interesting despite a number of irrelevant by-lines and lines of thought. The book takes the reader through Owen’s life well enough; the influences, the unremarkableness of his early life, his relationships with his parents and so on.
I think there are some interesting points to draw out. If you read Owen’s pre-war and early war poetry it is clear that without going to the front Owen would not have been a major poet. The early poems have nothing of the passion, anger and gut-wrenching in your face power of his late poems. Cuthbertson speculates that when Owen was wounded and concussed it may have sparked his poetic muse into life. I am not quite convinced by that, but his best poems were written at this time and whilst he was recovering from shellshock at Craiglockhart.
Another interesting point is Owen’s sexuality. It is fairly clear that Owen was attracted to men; once he found his muse his friends included Sassoon, Robert Ross (one of Wilde’s lovers), Osbert Sitwell and C K Scott Moncrieff; all of whom were gay (or in Sassoon’s case bisexual). Cuthbertson argues that Owen was attracted to women as well but was essentially chaste. Again there is no real way of knowing, but I wasn’t convinced and his poetry is certainly homoerotic. His relationship to his mother was very important to him. Also significant was his relationship with his father. Owen’s father was impatient of his son’s poetic leanings and was always urging him to be more “manly”.
Whatever there is to say about Owen, and there are better biographies (Hibberd) the poetry stands out; this is Disabled:

He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark,
And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey,
Legless, sewn short at elbow. Through the park
Voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn,
Voices of play and pleasure after day,
Till gathering sleep had mothered them from him.



About this time Town used to swing so gay
When glow-lamps budded in the light-blue trees,
And girls glanced lovelier as the air grew dim,—
In the old times, before he threw away his knees.
Now he will never feel again how slim
Girls' waists are, or how warm their subtle hands,
All of them touch him like some queer disease.



There was an artist silly for his face,
For it was younger than his youth, last year.
Now, he is old; his back will never brace;
He's lost his colour very far from here,
Poured it down shell-holes till the veins ran dry,
And half his lifetime lapsed in the hot race
And leap of purple spurted from his thigh.



One time he liked a blood-smear down his leg,
After the matches carried shoulder-high.
It was after football, when he'd drunk a peg,
He thought he'd better join. He wonders why.
Someone had said he'd look a god in kilts.
That's why; and maybe, too, to please his Meg,
Aye, that was it, to please the giddy jilts,
He asked to join. He didn't have to beg;
Smiling they wrote his lie: aged nineteen years.
Germans he scarcely thought of, all their guilt,
And Austria's, did not move him. And no fears
Of Fear came yet. He thought of jewelled hilts
For daggers in plaid socks; of smart salutes;
And care of arms; and leave; and pay arrears;
Esprit de corps; and hints for young recruits.
And soon, he was drafted out with drums and cheers.



Some cheered him home, but not as crowds cheer Goal.
Only a solemn man who brought him fruits
Thanked him; and then inquired about his soul.



Now, he will spend a few sick years in institutes,
And do what things the rules consider wise,
And take whatever pity they may dole.
Tonight he noticed how the women's eyes
Passed from him to the strong men that were whole.
How cold and late it is! Why don't they come
And put him into bed? Why don't they come?

[- ̗̀ jess ̖́- · Rating 4 out of 5]

i don’t think this is maybe as thorough of a biography as i wanted and i think it took liberties with literary analysis that perhaps weren’t fully warranted and comes across more as speculation — nevertheless it’s still a good summation of owen’s life. more thoughts to come perhaps

[Daisy Goodwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A century after the outbreak of the First World War, we can still hear the rumble of guns over its meaning. The education secretary Michael Gove has recently let off a fusillade against the “Blackadderisation” of the Great War in schools, and against the prevailing idea that this was a war of “lions led by donkeys”. But before he rewrites the history curriculum yet again, he might want to think about the English literature syllabus. Generations of schoolchildren in this country have gained their impression of the “war to end all wars”, not from the antics of Baldrick and co, but from the mordant poetry of Wilfred Owen. Even Gove’s boss, David Cameron, has cited Dulce et Decorum Est as his favourite poem. Public attitudes to 1914-18 have been shaped more than anything by poems such as Anthem for Doomed Youth and Strange Meeting, which are the creation, not of left-wing polemicists, but of a 25-year-old who died seven days before the armistice, trying to take the Oise-Sambre canal near Ors.

The First World War poets generally divide into the posh ones such as Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon — public school and Oxbridge — and the plebs such as Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg and Owen, who went to the University of Life. But Owen, as Guy Cuthbertson’s idiosyncratic biography suggests, was not a man of the people by choice. Born in Oswestry in 1893 into a lower-middle-class family (his father was a station master), Owen always aspired to something grander. He went to school in Shrewsbury — not to the famous public school but Shrewsbury Technical School. He dreamt of Oxford, but didn’t pass the scholarship exam and had to make do with a year at Reading University College where he studied English and botany.


In 1913 he went to Bordeaux to teach English at the Berlitz Institute, and began to turn himself into the sort of man he wanted to be, telling people that his father was a baronet and that he was shortly to go to Oxford. He took glamorous high-ceilinged rooms and collected antiques. He was in the Pyrenees tutoring an 11-year-old girl when war was declared, but despite his love of chivalric romances (he always wanted to be in the Italian cavalry) the century’s most famous war poet had no urgent desire to fight for his country. Cuthbertson speculates at some length about the road not taken by Owen over the Pyrenees into neutral Spain, where he could have spent the war in peace, but Owen was not a pacifist either. In 1915, he went back to England and joined the Artists’ Rifles; in 1916 he joined the Manchester Regiment, and later that year was sent to France as a second lieutenant.

At this point there is little indication that Owen was to become the voice of his generation; his letters to his mother are distinctly Pooterish. Unlike his hero Keats, another lower-middle-class boy with poetic aspirations, he did not develop his poetic voice right away — the assonant half rhymes that make his work so distinctive emerged in the last two years of his life. There is a suggestion, mooted by Cuthbertson, that the head injury that sent him back to Britain in 1917 with neurasthenia and a pronounced stammer may have somehow unleashed his creativity. But it was the war itself that was the catalyst. Owen’s letters home to his beloved mother spare no detail of the horrors he was experiencing; describing an attack he says: “Those 50 hours were the agony of my happy life.” Although as an officer he censored the correspondence of his men, he wrote that he could see no excuse for deceiving her. In his letters and in his poetry, Owen is bearing witness.

The turning point was when he was sent in June 1917 to recuperate at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh. He wrote some of his most famous poems there: Dulce et Decorum Est and Anthem for Doomed Youth. He showed his work to Sassoon, a fellow patient, who, on reading Anthem, said it was “the first occasion on which I was able to hail him as my equal”. Owen was impressed but not moulded by Sassoon — in the manuscript of Anthem it is clear that he ignores many of Sassoon’s suggestions. But through him,Owen was introduced to the sort of people he had always wanted to know: Robert Graves, the Sitwells, Arnold Bennett, the translator CK Scott Moncrieff, Robert Ross — the great friend of Oscar Wilde.


In Goodbye to All That, Graves described Owen as “an idealistic homosexual with a religious background”, but Cuthbertson is not convinced Owen was actively gay or indeed actively sexual at all. The overwhelming relationship of his life, according to one of his fellow soldiers, was with his mother. Although Owen could write a poem such as Who Is the God of Canongate?, which appears to be about a rent boy, as Cuthbertson points out it is not the poem that anyone who had actually used a rent boy would be likely to write. Owen was happiest and most affectionate with children of both sexes, and Cuthbertson sees this as an expression, not of perversion (as some have said), but of his own childlike nature.

Owen could so easily have survived the war. He was not sent back to the front until August 1918. Despite some trepidation, he went willingly enough: “I hate washy pacifists as temperamentally as I hate [whiskered] prussianists.” His poem Miners had been published in January; by June he had published several more and he felt a return to the front would be good for his art. He knew that the ugliness and horror he hated so much had made him a poet. In October 1918 he was awarded the Military Cross. A few weeks later he was dead.

Cuthbertson’s biography is admirably thorough in its unpacking of Owen’s poetic imagery. There is no reference that is unexplored (he makes a convincing connection, for instance, between Anthem for Doomed Youth and a speech by the prime minister, David Lloyd George). But he can’t resist indulging in biographical might-have-beens. “Owen could have seen DH   Lawrence, Ezra Pound and TS  Eliot in London at this time, on the streets or in the underground, but, as unknown figures, they were just faces in the crowd.” A little of this goes a long way, and it distracts from Owen’s astonishing metamorphosis from a dreamy fantasist into the defining voice of a terrible conflict.

If Gove really wants to rebrand 1914-18 as a just war, he should stop attacking Blackadder and ban Owen from the English syllabus. It is Owen’s voice, not Baldrick’s, that has forever shaped our perceptions of the trenches.

[Mario Hinksman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a quietly stirring and brilliantly researched account of the twenty-five year life of one of Britain’s most-loved poets. Writing a biography of Wilfred Owen is not a blank canvass but Cuthbertson charts his own course, neither avoiding nor seeking the areas covered by others. He does however give a fresh perspective on some of the received wisdoms about WO.

The account of WO’s life is a compelling tale of a Shropshire born boy, quickly discovering reduced circumstances and moving with his Father’s railway job to Birkenhead and ultimately Shrewsbury. WO’s mother is a constant theme and their mutual devotion is very clear. WO could be defined as ‘lower middle class’ and exclusions from and limitation of opportunity can be found throughout his formative years. It is only towards the end of his short life that WO connects with a circle and strata of society that he could have known earlier if his family’s finances had supported a better education.

The most consistent theme of WO’s life that comes through is a very human inconsistency. It is this inconsistency which perhaps partly explains his wide appeal as a human being as well as a poet and makes any attempt to pigeonhole WO to one cause or another rather futile. The same WO who is horrified by the conduct of WWI is also the man who was recognised for his bravery in capturing an enemy machine gun post. The young man unable to study at Oxford due to lack of finance or classical education and a system that heavily favours the products of public schools also romanticises about the public school life. Hailing from a devout protestant household, he leans towards the Catholic in his sympathises. Attempts to classify WO by sexuality also seem unlikely to reach a point of certainty. While WO’s brother tried so hard to ‘protect’ his reputation after his death and others have readily assumed homosexuality, Cuthbertson concludes that the reality was not so certain. The artistic circles in which WO associated towards the end of his life included a predictable proportion of homosexuals but WO certainly had his female admirers. WO is in many ways quite a lonely figure and often alone at his own choosing. Sometimes thought stand-offish in the army, Cuthbertson opts for a combination of shyness and a poetic desire for solitude.

WO’s biography cannot be detached from details of the extraordinary time in which he lived. WO was in France for the outbreak of war in August 1914, an event that was both sudden and surprising for many; contrary to the inevitability of the event as perceived in more upper class circles or retrospectively. Owen stayed in France throughout 1915 although incredibly English tourists were still crossing the Channel on route to the south of France at this time and Owen once returned to England in 1915 on an errand before returning to France to resume his tutoring duties. His initial venture to teach English at a language school led him to the role of a private tutor for a wealthy family.

Owen’s close relationship with children both in France and while working for a Rector near Reading is examined and recognised as potentially dubious to contemporary eyes. Cuthbertson concludes that there is no evidence that it was other than innocent; a combination of WO’s sometimes child-like nature, his having younger siblings and a different age.

Hanging over this book and any examination of WO’s life is the question ‘what if?’. For a life that was cut so short within a week of the end of a terrible four-year war, it doesn’t seem an unreasonable reaction. For WO’s own family, the news of his death cruelly arrived by telegram, a week later and an hour after the celebration of the Armistice had begun. If mere survival had been WO’s aim, he could have probably survived the war- in France for the start of the war and throughout 1915, he ended up with a wealthy family in the Pyrenees. Crossing to peaceful Spain would have been an attainable option, whatever the ethics or perceptions of cowardice. Surviving a spell at the Western front, he was hospitalised for neurasthenia to Craiglockart Hospital Edinburgh in 1917 and he assumed he would not return to the front. It was at Craiglockhart that he met other (arguably more famous and more established at the time) war poets such as Seigfreid Sassoon and Robert Graves. It was only the pressures precipitated by Russia’s withdrawal from the war that led to new demands for forces. WO’s official fitness rating steadily increased during 1918 and finally judged fit for front line service (without an apparent objection by himself) he left England for the last time on 31 August. Reading any tale of WO’s life seems to have the inevitable cloud that is 4 November 1918. Cuthbertson hints that after his return WO himself, saw his own death as expected if not inevitable. If WO had survived the war, it is uncertain whether his work would have been published in the same form or if his influence would have been as great alive rather than dead. As Cuthbertson points out, the last person born before WO, lived until 2007. While this is extreme, he could have easily made it to the television interviews of the 1970s. Yet this did not happen and WO knew no decline. As this book so powerfully reminds us he is forever 25, if not younger.

This book would be strongly recommended for anyone wishing to gain a greater understanding of the man behind the poems. The poems have now survived nearly a century and in many ways represent an ongoing protest about the wars and other adventures that ruling classes inflict on those they rule.
Cuthbertson's book is a great way of understanding something of the life that created these poems.

[Maggie Emmett · Rating 2 out of 5]

I rushed to read this book about one of my favourite poets and sadly found it disappointing. Perhaps Cuthbertson's Owen is just too far from any idea I have ever had of him.
This book paints him as cowardly and trying to avoid war for as long as possible. It suggests he was deceitful and a liar.
He come across as weak and a rather pathetic limp-wristed wimp.
I don't think Owen was like this...who really knows?

I did not like the tone of the book or the way it presented his life.
Nevertheless, it filled some obvious time gaps in his biography and expanded further knowledge about his relationship with his parents.

It makes no difference to his poetry - in fact I wonder if Cuthbertson even likes Owen or his work.

[Len Knighton · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was "introduced" to Wilfred Owen during the centenary of World War One, about six years ago. At the time he was just another luminary of many unknown characters prominent in The Great War, especially to the generations that followed mine.
Guy Cuthbertson's biography is a labor of love, of Owen and of poetry. He writes in a poetic style that is a two-edged sword. There is beauty in his words, particularly when combined with the poetry of Wilfred Own and his contemporaries. But it can also be difficult to read and understand. Because of Cuthbertson's technique, the book was slow-reading.

Some highlight's:
PAGE 55
Owen: WHEN OUT, ON HOLIDAY, I FEEL TIME WASTED AND CRAVE FOR A BOOK.

PAGE 72
Oscar Wilde: YET EACH MAN KILLS THE THING HE LOVES.

PAGE 201
Owen: THE EVANGELICALS HAVE FLED FROM A FEW CANDLES, DISCREET INCENSE, SERENE ALTARS, MYSTERIOUS MUSIC, HARMONIOUS RITUAL TO POWERFUL ELECTRIC-LIGHTING, OVERHEATED ATMOSPHERE, PALM-TREE PLATFORMS, GRAND PIANOS, LOUD AND ANIMATED MUSIC, EXTEMPORE RITUAL; BUT I CANNOT SEE THAT THEY ARE ANY NEARER TO THE KINGDOM.

Three stars waning

[Thekirkiepirate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Apart from a knowledge of his most popular work, I didn't know much about the life of Wilfred Owen, which took me to this biography.

The book is certainly informative and very painstakingly researched, but I did struggle with it at times - particularly during the description of Owen's early life, which was not particularly remarkable. I feel that the author could have dealt with this area more succinctly.

Once we move on to his later life, the book certainly improves and is well produced.

I am glad that I read this biography, although it did mean that I discovered that one of our finest poets shared a number of characteristics with Adrian Mole during his early years!

[Brigitte · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are a lot of elements I like here. For instance, the explanation about Owen and Christianity was well done. However, there’s too much speculation here: “Owen probably would have...” and “what if...” are used frequently and makes me distrust the biography. Plus, as someone who has read extensively on Owen, including his collected letters, I think Cuthbertson makes far too much (almost in every chapter) of Owen’s envy of the upper class, and this makes Owen come across as snobbish and unlikable, doing him a grave disservice.

[Moriah Sharpe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Wilfred Owen's poetry but didn't know much about his pre-war life, so I found this biography fascinating. I was not exposed to war poetry until college, and even then learned little about the poets' biographical backgrounds, so I enjoyed this dive into Owen's life. I felt the book humanized a giant of poetry and added depth to my future readings of his poems.

[Lyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting biography of this poet who truly found his voice during WW1 and speaks to us still of the horrors and pity of war.

[Shaun Hand]

Didn't finish. More me not having the energy to plough through than any bad writing.

[World Literature Today]

"Guy Cuthbertson adeptly shows Owen’s sharpness and intelligence, with a directness in his poetry that makes the reader experience the horrors of that war. The digressions into the lives of other artists and writers—Joyce, Toulouse-Lautrec, Isherwood—are not particularly relevant, but they demonstrate Cuthbertson’s intense inquiry into Owen’s life." - Daniel P. King, Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin

This book was reviewed in the November 2014 issue of World Literature Today. Read the full review by visiting our website: http://bit.ly/1AqX0yj

[Salvatore]

I had no idea that Owen tried to put on airs and seem like a public school/Oxford educated boy. He became fascinating to me when he went off to France to teach English and therefore was able to hide his Liverpudlian accent. He wanted desperately to do something heroic in the Great War. He was a Romantic certainly.

[Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

Different from other biographies of Owen in that it concentrates on Owen's relationship with his mother and does not go much into the rest of his family. The style really brings Owen to life. Nice selection of illustations.

[Dan G · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a compelling new biography of Wilfred Owen, the greatest poet of World War I (in my estimation).