Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen wrote the poems that ended the romance of war. Sent to Craiglockhart hospital in 1917 with shell shock, he met Siegfried Sassoon, who marked up his drafts and urged him toward the unflinching style of "Dulce et Decorum Est" — which calls the old patriotic Latin tag "the old Lie."

Owen returned to the front, won the Military Cross, and was killed crossing the Sambre–Oise Canal on 4 November 1918 — one week before the Armistice. The telegram reached his mother in Shrewsbury as the church bells were ringing for peace.

His draft preface contains the most famous statement of purpose in war poetry: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."