18th March: Wilfred Owen's birthday

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen MC was born on this date in 1893. He was one of the leading poets of the First World War. His best-known works include "Dulce et Decorum Est", "Insensibility", "Anthem for Doomed Youth", "Futility" and "Strange Meeting". Here are 10 things you may not know about Wilfred Owen:

1. When World War I broke out, Owen was teaching in France, and considered joining the French army - but returned to England and joined the British army in 1915.
2. As a young man, Owen worked as lay assistant to the Vicar of Dunsden near Reading.
3. During his first commission as a second lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment, he was not overly impressed with the men he was commanding. He wrote to his mother describing them as "expressionless lumps"!
4. After a close encounter with a trench mortar, he was diagnosed with shell shock and sent home to recover. While in hospital in Edinburgh, he met another poet, Siegfried Sassoon, who became his mentor and lifelong friend.
5. At the same time, Owen's therapist encouraged him to turn his experiences and his nightmares into poetry. He had been writing poetry since the age of 10, but this was no doubt the start of his career as a war poet.
6. When he returned to active service in 1918, Owen did not tell his friend Siegfried Sassoon, as he knew Sassoon was opposed to him doing so, when he could have remained on home duty until the end of the war. In fact, Sassoon had threatened to "stab him in the leg" if he tried to go back to the fighting. Owen felt strongly that he needed to continue to witness the horrors of war and communicate them though his poetry.
7. Owen was shot and killed a week before the end of the war, aged just 25. The news of his death reached his parents on Armistice Day.
8. Owen aspired to win a Military Cross, because he felt it would make him more credible as a war poet. He was awarded the medal after his death.
9. Scholars suggest that Owen may have been gay and his relationship with Sassoon went further than friendship. However, they cannot be sure since Owen's brother, Harold, edited his letters and diaries and removed anything he felt was discreditable.
10. A line from one of his poems is inscribed on Westminster Abbey's memorial to 16 great war poets (of which Owen is one). It reads: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."