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鈥淲hat passing-bells for those who die as cattle?鈥� begins Wilfred Owen鈥檚 Anthem for Doomed Youth, painting a horrific picture of what was happening on the Western Front during the Great War.

Owen was already writing poetry as a young man, inspired by the pastoral works of Keats and Shelley but his own writing came into its own after his time spent as an officer on the Western Front and his meeting with Siegfried Sassoon at Craig Lockhart when he was recovering from shell shock.

His stark descriptions of life (and death) on the front line paint never to be forgotten pictures of the Western Front.

War Reporter Martin Bell kept a volume of Owen鈥檚 poetry with him when he was reporting from war zones. He said 鈥渢hey comforted me 鈥� and reminded me someone had been there before鈥�.

Owen was killed a week before the end of the war. What sort of a poet would he have become had his life not been cut tragically short?

Location: Wyle Cop School, Shrewsbury, Shropshire SY1 1UY
Image: Wilfred Owen, with kind permission of the Wilfred Owen Estate, courtesy of The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, University of Oxford

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