What influenced Wilfred Owen to become a poet?

Wilfred Owen, who wrote some of the best British poetry on World War I, composed nearly all of his poems in slightly over a year, from August 1917 to September ... read more

His great friend, the poet Siegfried Sassoon, later had a profound effect on his poetic voice, and Owen's most famous poems ("Dulce et Decorum est" and"Anthem for Doomed Youth") show direct results of Sassoon's influence. read more

Wilfred Owen had written some poetry prior to WWI, but he began writing in earnest during his convalescence from PTSD within a program that incorporated writing, per Siegfried Sassoon. read more

Almost all of Owen’s poems, therefore, appeared posthumously: Poems (1920), edited by Siegfried Sassoon with the assistance of Edith Sitwell, contains twenty-three poems; The Poems of Wilfred Owen (1931), edited by Edmund Blunden, adds nineteen poems to this number; and The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen (1963), edited by C. Day Lewis, contains eighty poems, adding some juvenilia, minor poems, and fragments but omitting a few of the poems from Blunden’s edition. read more