Trench Poetry: Owen and Sassoon

Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) and Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) are the two most celebrated English poets of the First World War. They are often paired — they met at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh in 1917, and Sassoon's encouragement was instrumental in Owen's development as a poet. But their poetic methods are fundamentally different: where Owen reaches for pity, Sassoon deploys rage; where Owen's language is dense, musical, and formally innovative, Sassoon's is sharp, colloquial, and deliberately prosaic. Together, they represent the two dominant modes of war poetry: the elegiac and the satiric.

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Wilfred Owen

Owen is widely regarded as the greatest English-language poet of the First World War. His reputation rests on a relatively small body of work — most of his significant poems were written in the fourteen months between August 1917 and his death in action on 4 November 1918, one week before the Armistice.

Owen's Poetic Philosophy

Owen articulated his purpose with extraordinary clarity in a draft preface to a collection he never lived to publish:

"My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."