Recording the reality of the front as he himself had experienced it, while remaining loyal to the men with whom he had shared it, Owen defines the inner conflict his poetic enterprise engendered in a letter to his mother, asking “And am I not myself a conscientious objector with a very seared conscience?” (Letter to Susan Owen. Owen’s most widely studied war poems, written between the spring of 1917 and October 1918, show that the poet was committed to re-creating the battlefield for those who would never experience it. He was shot as he was helping his men to cross the Sambre Canal. (Hibberd 1973, 86)ġ Wilfred Owen, one of the best-known poets of the First World War, was killed in northern France on 4 th Nov 1918 just one week before the Armistice. And to describe it, I think I must go back and be with them. It will never be painted, and no actor will ever seize it.
It was not despair, or terror, for it was a blindfold look, and without expression, like a dead rabbit’s. But chiefly I thought of the very strange look on all faces in that camp an incomprehensible look, which a man will never see in England, though wars should be in England nor can it be seen in any battle.
