Wilfred Owen

Abstract This chapter surveys classical reception in the war poetry of Wilfred Owen and demonstrates the crucial importance of classics for his work. It begins with a brief biography of Owen, focusing particularly on his education, his unfulfilled hopes of attending university, and his determined efforts to learn Latin, and giving a summary of his war service, his treatment at Craiglockhart Hospital, and his friendship with Siegfried Sassoon. The chapter then turns to detailed discussion of the war poems. The poems are grouped into four categories, the first three of which foreground the most significant forms of classical reception that Owen employs: poems that allude to Horace’s Odes, starting with Owen’s most famous poem, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’; poems that allude, directly or indirectly, to the classical katabasis (Underworld journey) or to the Underworld itself; and Owen’s direct retellings of classical myths; a final Miscellaneous category includes other classically informed poems. Poems that include only brief references to classics are surveyed in a separate section. The chapter establishes that Owen was directly familiar with Horace’s Odes, showing that he not only quoted Horace’s Latin in ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ but also incorporated translations of Horatian phrases and aspects of Horatian structure into other poems. The chapter also demonstrates Owen’s familiarity with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Vergil’s Aeneid, and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.