Owen Seaman, born on 18 September 1861 in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, and dead on 2 February 1936, occupied an unusually influential place in British literary culture for a man whose name is now less familiar than the names of many writers he parodied, edited, or helped to popularize. Poet, humorist, classicist, journalist, critic, lecturer, and long-serving editor of Punch, he was one of the most conspicuous representat…
“I should indeed be ungrateful if after an entertainment so smoothly and dexterously administered I were to be captious about origins or other matters of pedantry.”
Neighbourhood:
Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Light Verse Poets
Emotional landscape: Irony, Sorrow, Anger
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…
“Above all, this book is not concerned with Poetry. The subject of it is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Edwardian Poets, Political Poets, War Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Irony
