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…
“Catalogue? Photograph? Can you photograph the crimson-hot iron as it cools from the smelting? That is what Jones's blood looked like, and felt like. My senses are charred.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Edwardian Poets, Political Poets, War Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Irony
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…
“The nation is being sacrificed to the vanity and self-interest of the politicians.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, LGBTQ+ Poets, Political Poets, War Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Irony
