Wilfred Owen was born in Oswestry, near the Welsh border, the eldest child of a railway clerk and a devout mother to whom he was devoted all his life. He wanted to be a poet from his teens, worshipped Keats, and worked for a while as an assistant to a country vicar. When the First World War began in 1914, he was teaching English in Bordeaux.

He came home and enlisted in 1915, and was commissioned as an officer in the Manchester Regiment. In January 1917 he was sent to the front in France, in one of the coldest winters of the war. Within months he had been through days of shelling, including one that blew him into the air and left him lying for days near the remains of a fellow officer. He was sent home with shell shock.

At Craiglockhart War Hospital, outside Edinburgh, he met Siegfried Sassoon, already known for his furious war poems and his public protest against the war. Owen, shy and a little in awe, showed Sassoon his work. Sassoon encouraged him to write plainly about what he had seen, and in a few months at Craiglockhart, Owen wrote or drafted many of the poems we remember, including “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” which survives with Sassoon’s penciled suggestions in the margin, and “Dulce et Decorum Est,” which ends by calling the old Latin saying that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country “the old Lie.”

He could have stayed in Britain. He chose to go back to France in 1918, in part, he wrote, to be able to speak for the men in the trenches. He won the Military Cross for bravery that October. On November 4, he was killed by machine-gun fire while helping his men across the Sambre–Oise Canal. The war ended a week later. His mother received the telegram on Armistice Day, as the church bells were ringing to celebrate the peace.

Only five of his poems were published in his lifetime. Sassoon gathered them into a book in 1920. Among his papers was a draft preface: “My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.” In 1962, Benjamin Britten set nine of his poems in the War Requiem.