Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen published five poems in his lifetime. He was twenty-five years old when he was killed at the Sambre-Oise Canal in northern France — seven days before the Armistice. His mother received the telegram while the church bells were ringing for peace. Today he is considered the defining voice of the First World War, the poet who broke the lie that it was sweet and honorable to die for one's country. He didn't have to go back. He had been evacuated with shell shock, treated at Craiglockhart where he met Siegfried Sassoon, and written the poems that would change how the English-speaking world thinks about war. He could have stayed on home duty. He chose to return — to be with the men he felt responsible for, to be inside the thing he was documenting. That decision, and the contradiction it contained, is the engine of his life and his art. This episode follows Owen from Bordeaux to the Somme, through the door at Craiglockhart where Sassoon sat in a purple dressing gown cleaning his golf clubs, to the seven words that carried everything — and finally to the bells that rang on Armistice Day while his mother stood holding a telegram, and the question mark she removed from his grave.