exposure
wilfred owen
Published: 1917
Birth – Death: 1893 - 1918
Monarch: George V
Prime Minister: David Lloyd George (Liberal)
Nationality: British
Exposure gives the viewpoint of an individual on the front-line based on Owen’s experiences in 1917. It communicates that the real torturer was the weather and limited process of the war, stating that ‘Nothing happens’. The soldiers are exposed to the extreme cold and wait, forced to have the upmost patience.
who is wilfred owen?
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Wilfred Owen is a soldier and a poet.
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Owen was born on 18 March 1893 at Plas Wilmot, a house in Weston Lane, near Oswestry in Shropshire.
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He was the first son of Thomas and (Harriett) Susan Owen’s four children. He had his sister, Mary Millard, William Harold and Collin Shaw Owen. They lived in a house owned by his grandfather, Edward Shaw.
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After Edward's death in January 1897, and the house's sale in March, the family lodged in the back streets of Birkenhead. Thomas temporarily worked at the railway company there.
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He transferred several times for different jobs. He went to Shrewsbury to live with Thomas’ parents, to Birkenhead to be a stationmaster at Woodside station, then back to Shrewsbury in 1907.
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Wilfred Owen was educated in the Birkenhead Institute and at Shrewsbury Technical School.
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Owen discovered his poetic vocation in about 1904, during a holiday spent in Cheshire.
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His early influences included the Bible and the "big six" of romantic poetry, particularly John Keats.
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Owen's last two years of formal education saw him as a pupil-teacher at the Wyle Cop school in Shrewsbury. In 1911 he passed the matriculation exam for the University of London, but not with the first-class honours needed for a scholarship, which in his family's circumstances was the only way he could have afforded to attend.
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Owen was an assistant to the Vicar of Dunsden near Reading, with free housing and some tuition for the entrance exam. During this time he attended classes at University College, Reading. in botany and later, free Old English classes. However, he left the church as it failed to care for those in its locality.
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From 1913 he worked as a private tutor teaching English and French at the Berlitz School of Languages in Bordeaux, France, and later with a family.
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When war broke out, Owen did not rush to enlist - and even considered the French army - but eventually returned to England.
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On 21 October 1915, he enlisted in the Artists Rifles Officers' Training Corps. For the next seven months, he trained at Hare Hall Camp in Essex.
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On 4 June 1916, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant (on probation) in the Manchester Regiment.
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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.
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Soon afterward, Owen was diagnosed as suffering from neurasthenia or shell shock and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh for treatment.
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At the very end of August 1918, Owen returned to the front line. On October 1918 Owen led units of the Second Manchesters to storm a number of enemy strong points near the village of Joncourt.
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For his courage and leadership in the Joncourt action, he was awarded the Military Cross, an award he had always sought in order to justify himself as a war poet.
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Owen was killed in action on 4 November 1918 during the crossing of the Sambre–Oise Canal (Canal in Northern France), exactly one week (almost to the hour) before the signing of the Armistice.
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Owen is buried at Ors Communal Cemetery, Ors, in northern France.
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To commemorate Wilfred’s life and poetry, The Wilfred Owen Association was formed in 1989.
What is Wilfred Owen’s Poetic History?
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Owen is regarded by many as the greatest poet of the First World War, known for his verse about the horrors of trench and gas warfare.
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The Romantic poets Keats and Shelley influenced much of his early writing and poetry along with his friend later, Siegfried Sassoon.
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His poetry itself underwent significant changes in 1917. As a part of his therapy at Craiglockhart, Owen's doctor, Arthur Brock, encouraged Owen to translate his experiences.
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Owen's experiences in war led him further to challenge his religious beliefs, claiming in his poem "Exposure" that "love of God seems dying".
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In 1975 Mrs. Harold Owen, Wilfred's sister-in-law, donated all the manuscripts, photographs and letters which her late husband had owned to the University of Oxford's English Faculty Library.
What happened in World War One?
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World War One was a trench war, as in people fought on the ground and hid behind trenches to gain cover.
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If you weren’t killed by the extreme weather and poor hygiene, you would probably fie from one of your own guns as it misfired, or in the confusion and smoke.
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The main way of communicating through this war was with newspapers, radios and letters.
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Fighting in World War One was seen as a noble and brave action to commit to, you would be treated with the upmost honour. The war was glorified, and people were indoctrinated to ‘fight for their country’ and risk their life.
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The media often censored the horrific and torturous details in favour of not worrying the public or scaring potential future soldiers. The government needed support from the public, so they only revealed positive statements about the war.
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Wilfred Owen knew that the media did not report the actual topics of the condition soldiers were kept in.
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Soldiers had to stay out in run-down and man-dug trenches for long periods of time, they couldn’t change their footwear or head for shelter when it rained. They had to stay awake in case of an ambush or attack.
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Wilfred was in these horrendous conditions and wrote Exposure to present to the public the realities of war.
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Most poems about World War One, glorified the war in a patriotic way, that meant Owen faced slight criticism for this poem.
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Wilfred Owen found that war was futile and pointless.
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He wrote to his mother: ‘The marvel is that we did not all die of cold. As a matter of fact, only one of my party actually froze to death before he could be got back, but I am not able to tell how many have ended up in hospital. We were marooned in a frozen desert. There was not a sign of life on the horizon and a thousand signs of death.’