“Thus you see how pure Christianity will not fit in with pure patriotism.” — Wilfred Owen | V2Melody

“Thus you see how pure Christianity will not fit in with pure patriotism.”

Recognising a conflict between Christian teaching and unquestioning national loyalty · Letter to Susan Owen, May 1917

About Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen

18 March 1893–4 November 1918

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…

More by Wilfred Owen

Poems by Wilfred Owen

More remarks by Wilfred Owen

“I am started. The tugs have left me; I feel the great swelling of the open sea taking my galleon.”

Using a maritime image to describe the exhilaration of emerging artistic independence · Letter to Susan Owen, 31 December 1917

“It will never be painted, and no actor will ever seize it. And to describe it, I think I must go back and be with them.”

Expressing his conviction that truthful witness required renewed proximity to soldiers' suffering · Letter to Susan Owen, 31 December 1917

“I hate washy pacifists as temperamentally as I hate whiskied prussianists.”

Rejecting simplistic positions on both pacifism and militarism · Letter, 2 October 1917