Siegfried Loraine Sassoon was born on 8 September 1886 at Weirleigh, a house near the village of Matfield in Kent, and died on 1 September 1967 at Heytesbury House in Wiltshire, a week before his eighty-first birthday. He remains one of the defining literary witnesses of the First World War: a poet whose plain speech, anger, technical control, and mordant irony broke through the patriotic consolations of his age. Yet…
“I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, LGBTQ+ Poets, Political Poets, War Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Irony
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born on 18 March 1893 at Plas Wilmot, a house near Oswestry in Shropshire, on the borderland between England and Wales. He was the eldest of four children of Thomas Owen and Susan Shaw Owen; his siblings were Mary, Harold, and Colin. The family’s circumstances were respectable but precarious. Thomas had once been employed as a railway stationmaster, and Susan came from a family with str…
“Thus you see how pure Christianity will not fit in with pure patriotism.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Edwardian Poets, Political Poets, War Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Irony
