His father, a man of adventurous spirit, had taken himself to India at the age of eighteen, having obtained a job with the Peninsular Railways. After four years he returned to England, married, and took a post on the railway here. But he never reconciled himself to a career which gave so little scope for enterprise and adventure.

Wilfred’s mother had been brought up in a Calvinistic and rigidly ‘Victorian’ atmosphere. Her family had been comfortably off ; but when her father died, it was found that he had lived on his capital. Throughout her married life, therefore, she had to subsist and bring up a family on her husband’s salary alone. The straitened means of their parents were to affect profoundly the lives of Wilfred, his sister and his two brothers : it can also be surmised that the contrasting nature of his parents—the father’s independent, impatient spirit, the mother’s gentleness, conventionality and deeply religious disposition—helped to set up in Wilfred’s mind that tension between opposites which so often creates the artist.

Both father and mother, though far from being intellectuals, were cultivated people. Mr. Owen was a well-informed man who kept up serious reading to the end of his life, and was not without discernment in the other arts, especially music. Mrs. Owen had shown, as a girl, considerable technical accomplishment in painting. The civilized atmosphere of the Owen home did much to compensate for the lack of those higher educational facilities which, money being so short, the parents could not give their children. Had Wilfred had the benefit of a University education, for instance, his intellectual development would have been more rapid; but his poetry would not necessarily have been the better for that.

His relationship with his mother, whose favourite he was, remained the closest one in his short life. Indeed, his letters to her* read like those of an only child, with the warmth and the touch of possessiveness which an only son so often shows towards his mother : in his adolescence, these letters tend to be ‘literary’ ; we are aware that he is trying to impress her, just as later, writing from France, he spares her few of the horrors, appealing—though unconsciously and tacitly—for her special sympathy. Towards his sister and younger brothers Owen is very much the eldest son : he writes to them at times almost as if he were their father, with quaint touches of pontificating and lecturing relieved by a levity which is often slightly condescending. We get the impression of a serious, clever but naïf youth, a little smug, a little ‘old-fashioned’, who feels responsible for the younger members of his family, as might the eldest son of a widowed mother. We see, prefigured here, the sense of responsibility Owen was to feel as an officer towards his own men in France, and as a poet towards all the soldiers fighting and suffering there.

In boyhood, Wilfred Owen had many interests. He studied botany and archaeology, became a competent pianist, began to read widely, moving on from the Sherlock Holmes stories to Dickens, Scott, George Eliot and Ruskin. Years later he was to write from Craiglockhart War Hospital, “Believe me, if the letter of Ruskin is little worshipped today, his spirit is everywhere. My one grudge against that Prophet is that he warned us so feebly against the War.” It has been said that Owen was no great reader. Certainly, in his letters to his mother he does not often mention books—or his own writing. But, when he died, he left a library of 325 volumes, which was not bad for a young man with very little money to spare. These included editions of many poets—Dante, Chaucer, Goethe, Southey, Gray, Collins, Cowper, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Bums, Browning and Tennyson, for instance; a number of French classics and text—books; nearly all Shakespeare’s plays; a fair sprinkling of novels, from Jane Austen to Hardy; and miscellaneous volumes attesting to his interests outside literature. Owen’s reading was at random perhaps (as a poet’s often is), and undirected; but he got through a good deal of it.

At what age he began writing verse, I have not been able to determine. But the poetic temperament was fully formed by the age of eighteen. In a letter of April 2nd, 1911, he wrote “Leslie tells me you are often hearing the nightingale. Is it indeed so enchanting ? I crave to hear it, and yet I should almost be afraid lest it should not be as fine as I imagine it.” Some MS. notes in Harold Owen’s possession, undated, but probably of this period, fill out the picture of a youth oppressed by the vague dissatisfaction and disillusionment, the morbid negativism of adolescence:

Why have so many poets courted death?

  1. Dissatisfaction when visiting some spot of literary or historical association.
    The impossibility of seeing the departed hero. Uncertainty of changes in buildings, and landscape.
  2. Mental fatigue accompanying prolonged gazing at objects of art, paintings, sculpture.
  3. Same with beauties of Nature—omnipotent sense of transience and temporality.
  4. Perversity of my nature—when alone, a lovely sight makes me long for someone else to enjoy it with me: with some equisite[sic] scene or sound (nightingale) or solemn place … around me, a companion annoys me with lack of feeling, solemnity, sympathy (yea perception) of my emotion.
  5. When I am reading or studying, I long to be out, up and doing. When out, on holidays, I feel time wasted and crave for a book.

On the reverse of the folio Owen wrote.

Consummation is Consumption

We cannot consummate our bliss and not consume.

All joys are cakes and vanish in the eating.

All bliss is sugar’s melting in the mouth.

Owen was not so thoroughly introverted at this age as the above notes might suggest. He could look outwards.