Wilfred Owen was an English poet known for his realistic depictions of the horrors of trench and gas warfare during World War I in poems like "Dulce et Decorum est", influenced by his mentor Siegfried Sassoon. He enlisted in 1915 but suffered shell shock after being concussed in a shell hole and blown up by a trench mortar. While recuperating in a hospital, he met Sassoon who transformed his life and poetry to focus on the realities of war in contrast to the patriotic works of earlier poets. Owen is now considered one of the most famous war poets for works expressing the tragedy and disillusionment of World War I.

1. By Javier
Wilfred Edgard Salter Owen was an English poet and soldier. He wrote
about the horrors of trenches and gas warfare, influenced by his mentor
Siegfried Sassoon and in contrast to the public perception of war at the
time and to the confidently patriotic verse written by earlier war poets
such as Rupert Brooke.
Owen was born on 18 March 1893 at Plas Wilmot, a house in Weston Lane,
near Oswestry in Shropshire. His siblings were Harold, Colin, and Mary
Millard Owen. When Wilfred was born, his parents lived in a comfortable
house owned by his grandfather, Edward Shaw, but after the latter's
death in January 1897, and the house's sale in March, the family moved to
Birkenhead while Thomas Owen temporarily worked in the town, employed
by a railway company.
On 21 October 1915 he enlisted in the Artists' Rifles Officers' Training
Corps. His imaginative existence was to be changed dramatically by a
number of traumatic experiences. He fell into a shell hole and suffered
concussion; he was blown up by a trench mortar and spent several days
unconscious on an embankment lying amongst the remains of one of his
fellow officers. Soon afterward, Owen was diagnosed as suffering from
neurasthenia or shell shock and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in
Edinburgh for treatment. It was while recuperating at Craiglockhart that
he met fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon, an encounter that was to transform
Owen's life.
His best-known works are "Dulce et Decorum est", "Insensibility", "Anthem
for Doomed Youth", "Futility" and "Strange Meeting".