Writing to his brother Harold, then an art student, in June, 1911, he said,

I wished you could daub some representation of a Field, which I saw blazing with yellow charlock, backed by a Beech-wood of a deep green so nearly black that it puts one in mind of the colour of an ancient black coat assuming its green old-age tints.

Such precise, and rather Hardy-esque, observation is as rare, though, in Owen’s youthful letters as in his juvenilia. These early poems, glowing and grandiose like technicolour sunsets, were written in a state of infatuation. Owen had not merely fallen in love with Keats; he felt for him at once a reverence and a strong affinity. On seeing a MS. book of Keats’s in the British Museum, he remarked (letter of September 17th, 1911),

His writing is rather large and slopes like mine. … He also has my trick of not joining letters in a word … I seem to be strangely familiar with it.

On this characteristic of Owen, Osbert Sitwell justly observed—“He manifested a tremendous capacity for admiration, for reverence: a quality which perhaps every poet, however much of a rebel he may be in other directions, must needs possess.”

The year 1911 marked a new departure in Owen’s life. He had been a pupil at the Birkenhead Institute from 1900 to 1907, then attended the Shrewsbury Technical School. In September, 1911, he matriculated at London University. Money, however, was too short for him to be able to take up courses there. So, in October, he went to Dunsden, Oxfordshire, as a pupil and lay assistant to the vicar.

At this time, Wilfred Owen was still a Christian believer, and there seemed a possibility that he might in due course enter Holy Orders, after studying theology and practising pastoral work under the vicar. The effect of Dunsden upon him, however, was far different from what had been anticipated. The vicar, though an amicable man, does not appear to have been a very inspiring one: from Wilfred’s letters home, we learn that the Reverend Herbert Wigan possessed a large number of picture frames, and used to take his pupil into Reading to buy pictures of the right size to fit them. Neither Owen’s fellow pupils nor the parishioners offered him any intellectual stimulus. He wrote (letter of January 26th, 1912),

But the isolation from any whose interests are the same as mine, the constant, inevitable mixing with persons whose influence will tend in the opposite direction (away from systematic study)—this is a serious drawback.

But, if intellectual companionship was lacking, his work at Dunsden (for which he received £1 a month) did make one profound impression upon Owen’s mind. Visiting among the rural slums of that Oxfordshire parish, he was brought up hard against certain facts of life—squalor, sickness, and a poverty far more crippling than the straitened means of his own family. This experience must have knocked holes in his introspective, subjective habit of mind, and forced him to look outwards at the real world. The tremendous force of indignant compassion which sweeps through his war poems did not have its origin in the Western Front: we feel it first in certain letters from Dunsden.

… a gentle little girl of five, fast sinking under Consumption—contracted after chicken-pox. Isn’t it pitiable … the Father is permanently out of work, and the Mother I fancy half starving for the sake of four children. This, I suppose is only a typical case; one of many Cases! O hard word! How it savours of rigid, frigid professionalism ! How it suggests smooth and polished, formal, labelled, mechanical callousness!

Letter of March 23rd, 1912.

They may have (e.g. the fires of revolt may have died down) in the bosoms of the muses, but not in my breast. I am increasingly liberalising and liberating my thought … From what I hear straight from the tight-pursed lips of wolfish ploughmen in their cottages, I might say there is material ready for another revolution.

Letter of April 23rd, 1912.

This awakening of a social conscience in Owen was soon followed by, if indeed it did not cause, a lapse from the Christian faith. On January 4th, 1913, in a letter to his mother, he declared,

I have murdered my false creed. If a true one exists, I shall find it. If not, adieu to the still falser creeds that hold the hearts of nearly all my fellow men.

Failure of conviction, and an illness, caused him to give up his work at Dunsden. In August of this year he obtained a post as English tutor at the Berlitz School of Languages in Bordeaux, and went out the next month to France, a country he had twice visited with his father between 1907 and 1910. He held this post until July 1914, when he became tutor to two boys in a Catholic family in the same city.

During this period Owen suffered from recurrent minor ailments—he had not been robust as a child, and the chilly damp of two Oxfordshire winters had done his health no good—the details of which he assiduously reported in his letters home. Though it enabled him to improve his French, the job provided no great interest and only a bare living wage. He became a bit of a hypochondriac: he felt discouraged about his future, and had no certain conviction as to what he should do with his talents. What was his vocation?

It is more like the call of an art which morning and evening makes me unhappy in my unfruitful labour. What art? … Any! … .