Owen, was virtually unknown in his lifetime and wrote many of his poems in 1917 and 1918. They were published after his death in action, aged just 25, during a British assault on the German-held Sambre Canal on the Western Front on November 4, 1918, seven days before the signing of the Armistice which ended the Great War.
Here is a summary of his best 10 poems which are available in one collection here
Top Ten Poems of Wilfred Owen
1 Futility
This is a brief lyric that focuses on a group of soldiers standing over the dead body of a fallen comrade, and is one of Owen’s finest uses of his trademark pararhyme (or half-rhyme). Although the speaker and his fellow soldiers seem to think that the ‘kind old sun’ will be able to revive their dead comrade, we readers know that this is hopeful optimism if not naivety on the part of the speaker.
2 Strange Meeting
Siegfried Sassoon called ‘Strange Meeting’ Owen’s passport to immortality; it’s certainly true that it’s poems like this that helped to make Owen the definitive English poet of the First World War. The poem is narrated by a soldier who dies in battle and finds himself in Hell. There he meets a man whom he identifies as a ‘strange friend’. This other man tells the narrator that they both nurtured similar hopes and dreams, but they have both now died, unable to tell the living how piteous and hopeless war really is. This other soldier then reveals to the narrator that he is the enemy soldier whom the narrator killed in battle yesterday. He tells the narrator that they should sleep now and forget the past.
3 Anthem for Doomed Youth
One of the most famous poems written about the First World War, this Petrarchan sonnet sees Owen lamenting the young men who are giving their lives for the war, contrasting traditional funeral images with those the war dead receive: the funeral bell that normally marks someone’s death with solemnity is denied to the soldiers who die on the battlefield – their only ‘passing bells’ are the sound of gunfire. Through these images, Owen argues that there is little glory in the deaths of these young men dying on the Western Front.
4 Arms and the Boy
Owen’s title, ‘Arms and the Boy’, wryly plays on the opening lines of Roman poet Virgil’s great epic The Aeneid: ‘Arms and the man I sing’. Whereas Virgil’s words usher in a poem detailing high heroic deeds and the founding of an empire (Aeneas was the ancestor of Romulus and Remus, legendary founders of Rome), Owen’s title focuses on the way war corrupts and destroys youthful innocence. And this war will not make a new empire. Indeed, four empires would crumble by the end of the First World War. (Owen wrote ‘Arms and the Boy’ in spring 1918, around eight months before the end of the war.)
5 The Send-Off
Describing a group of new soldiers departing for the trenches by train, ‘The Send-Off’ muses upon the unknown fates of those men who left for war. Do they now mock the women who gave them flowers to wish them goodwill as they left for the horrors of the Front?
6 The Parable of the Old Man and the Young
This is not one of Wilfred Owen’s best-known poems, perhaps partly because it doesn’t deal as directly with his experiences of the First World War as some of the other poems on this list. But although it’s not his greatest poem, it does offer a different take on Owen’s theme: ‘the pity of war’. Based on the Old Testament story of Abraham being prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac when commanded to do so by God, this poem draws a parallel between this biblical tale and WWI, with many young men being offered up as sacrifices by their fathers (it was, after all, old men who sent the young to war – war which the older generation was exempt from serving in). The poem also offers a sort of mockery of the sonnet: it ends with the rhyming couplet associated with the English sonnet form, but this comes as an addition to the sonnet’s usual fourteen lines, and the previous fourteen lines of Owen’s poem are unrhymed (albeit with some pararhyme).
7 Mental Cases
As well as conveying the physical effects of warfare, Owen’s poetry also often gets across the psychological damage wrought by the industrial slaughter on the Western Front. Perhaps no poem better encapsulates this than ‘Mental Cases’, in which Owen describes those ‘men whose minds the Dead have ravished’. This poem also features one of Owen’s most arresting uses of surprising imagery: watch out for the description of how ‘night comes blood-black’.
8 Insensibility
Divided into six sections, this poem explores ‘insensibility’, or numbness and lack of feeling, of various kinds. Drawing on the Beatitudes from Christ’s Sermon on the Mount in the New Testament (‘Blessed are …’), Owen’s poem undoes any idea of blessedness and bliss in battle. There appear to be no ‘peacemakers’, blessed or otherwise, in the trenches of the First World War.
9 Greater Love
Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’: this biblical quotation provided Owen with the title for this powerful but complex poem about male sacrifice on the battlefield. Owen suggests that there is something pure about the soldiers who give their lives in war; the love they represent, and command, is higher than any other kind of love.
10 Dulce et Decorum Est
One of the most famous of all war poems and probably the best-known of all of Wilfred Owen’s poems, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ (the title is a quotation from the Roman poet Horace, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori or ‘it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country’) was written in response to the jingoistic pro-war verses being written by people like Jessie Pope. Indeed, Pope is the ‘friend’ whom Owen addresses directly in the closing lines of the poem.
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