Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class Wilfred Owen, War Poet About this episode Wilfred Owen is considered one of the most important English-language poets of World War I. His work also part of a shift in how many British poets were writing about war.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:04 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argonix. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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1:37 Tracy V. Wilson? The Old Gays are back with Silver Linings, their lovable podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Robert, Mick, Bill, and Jessa strut back down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love, and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience. So tune in to Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
2:05 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.
2:16 Tracy V. Wilson? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
2:19 Holly Frey? And I'm Holly Frey.
2:21 Tracy V. Wilson? Before we start today's episode, we're going to Morocco.
2:24 Holly Frey? Yeah, in November.
2:27 Tracy V. Wilson? In November, yes, November 4th through 15th, 2025. There are still some spots available. I think they are all spots for people traveling as a pair, whether that is a couple or friends or
2:44 Tracy V. Wilson? some other option that involves two people, siblings.
2:47 Holly Frey? Right.
2:48 Tracy V. Wilson? Parent and child.
2:49 Holly Frey? Right. Or if you're adventurous.
2:52 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
2:52 Holly Frey? You could share with a stranger and our, our friends at Define Destinations would work that out for you.
2:58 Tracy V. Wilson? Yes, yes. I know they were getting in touch with some of the folks that were booked as individuals to see if they might be open to that. Some of our prior trips, we've had some more flexibility in terms of being able to add rooms of different types, but this time the hotel spaces are more predetermined and fixed.
3:19 Holly Frey? Yeah, it's a little more, it's a little less flexible, a little more limited.
3:22 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
3:23 Holly Frey? But also perhaps the most fun ever.
3:26 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, we're also both incredibly excited about it. We're going to be staying in nice hotels and also one night of desert glamping. The desert glamping accommodation is also incredibly nice. Breakfast is included every day, also lots of dinners and a number of lunches included. And we will have professional guides the whole time, showing us the sites, telling us all about what we're seeing and experiencing. And this also has some fun activities that are very unlike activities we have done on our previous trips, including, number one, a sunset camel ride.
4:05 Tracy V. Wilson? A wine tasting, and there's a tile making and crafts workshop and a Moroccan cooking class. My spouse is extremely excited about that one. He loves to cook and already knows some Moroccan dishes and is very excited to learn more. So if this sounds fun to you, it sure does sound fun to me, you can go to defineddestinations.com. And if you click on the tours button in the menu, it's the one called A Taste of Morocco. And again, that is from November 4th through 15th, 2025. More information at defineddestinations.com.
4:47 Tracy V. Wilson? And now we'll get to today's episode. It's been a while since we have talked about a poet on the show, especially a poet whose work is in the public domain. So we can read as much of it as we want as part of the episode. And I really do love to talk about poets. This one is Wilfred Owen and is considered to be one of the most important English language poets of World War I. His work was also seen as part of a shift in how a lot of British poets were writing about war. Also, his life almost seems like it was intentionally written to be as tear jerking as possible. Like if you were writing a movie about a World War
5:32 Tracy V. Wilson? I soldier poet, and you wanted it to be really sad, that would be Wilfred Owen.
5:39 Holly Frey? So Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born on March 18th, 1893, in Owsworth Street, Shropshire in Western England. This is on the border with Wales. And before the 1530s, it was part of England at some points and Wales at others. Various street names and other place names there reflect both English and Welsh influences. And a lot of families in the area, including Wilfred Owen's family, have both English and Welsh ancestry.
6:08 Tracy V. Wilson? Wilfred was the oldest of four siblings. The others were Harold, Colin, and Mary. Their father, Thomas, known as Tom, was a railroad station master and had previously been a seaman. Their mother, Harriet Susan Shaw Owen, went by Susan and was devoutly religious. When Wilfred was born, they were living at Plas Wilmot, which is a villa that belonged to Susan's father, Edward Shaw. The oldest part of the villa had been built around 1829, and it had been added on to over the years, including a stable, a coach house, a wash house, a servants cottage, and a kitchen. And the grounds also had a garden and a pond.
6:52 Holly Frey? The Shaws had been financially comfortable, or at least they had seemed to be financially comfortable. But when Wilfred was four, Edward died, and the family learned that he had actually been in serious debt. They had to auction off Plas Wilmot, along with all of its furniture and effects, to pay off those debts. And then the family moved to Birkenhead, across the River Mersey from Liverpool.
7:17 Tracy V. Wilson? Wilfred surely noticed the change in his family's circumstances, but since he was only four, he probably did not fully understand all of it. But his mother really struggled with it, especially since some of her family had already thought that her marriage to Wilfred's father had been a step down. She had very high ambitions for Wilfred from the time that he was born. And this loss of income and status probably played a part in how really insistent she was that he make something of himself.
7:53 Holly Frey? Wilfred was a thoughtful, sensitive boy, and he was interested in literature and poetry from an early age. He liked other subjects as well, including botany, geology, and archaeology. He and his cousins Vera and Leslie Gunston started their own three-person Astronomical, Geological, and Botanical Society. In 1900, Wilfred started attending a boy's school called the Birkenhead Institute, where he developed a reputation for being a very serious student. When the family moved to Shrewsbury, which some people also say Shrewsbury, he transferred to Shrewsbury Technical School, and he graduated from there in 1911.
8:34 Tracy V. Wilson? Boy, did I try to figure out if there is a pronunciation people like best. And I found many of each of them in recorded examples. Wilfred wanted to continue his education and he passed the matriculation exam at London University. He did not do well enough to earn a scholarship, though, and his family didn't have the money to pay for it without one. He took correspondence classes while trying to find work to support himself. He thought that he might become a poet or an artist, but his mother was really adamant that whatever he did to distinguish himself needed to come along with a steady income.
9:14 Holly Frey? As we said, Wilfred's mother was devoutly religious and he was very, very close to her. This may have been one of the reasons why he started thinking about pursuing some kind of religious vocation. He started working as a lay assistant for the vicar of Dunston, which is west of London, outside of Reading. This was an unpaid position and Owen was working in exchange for room and board. And that work included attending all of the church services, of which there were many, and working with the people of the parish. He also took some botany classes at University College Reading, and he was fond of the Romantic poets like John Keats and Percy Shelley, and his first poems were largely derivative of their work.
9:57 Tracy V. Wilson? By 1913, it had become clear to Owen that a life in the Anglican Church was not for him. He was passionate about poetry in a way that he wasn't about religion, but he had also become disillusioned with the church. One reason was that he thought the church was not meeting its obligations to the poor. He was working with people who were sick and living in poverty and just desperately needed help, while the vicar had a pretty comfortable life in the vicarage. Owen also developed some kind of respiratory condition, possibly related to living and working in damp, moldy spaces.
10:36 Holly Frey? He left his position with the vicar, and after he recovered from his respiratory illness, Owen went to France. For about a year, he taught English at Berlitz School in Bordeaux. Then he started working for the Leges family, tutoring their daughter Nanette and helping Madame Leges practice her English ahead of a planned trip to Canada. Owen was also essentially Nanette's playmate, since she didn't really have anyone else to play with. Owen lived with the Leges and shared most of their meals, but he was not otherwise paid.
11:09 Tracy V. Wilson? World War I started not long after Owen met the Leges, but the area where they were staying was kind of remote. It was close to the border with Spain. News traveled slowly there, and while they did see newspaper reports about things like the assassinations of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, a lot of this reporting was more like propaganda than a really accurate account of what was going on. So it wasn't immediately clear to them just how things were escalating in other parts of Europe.
11:44 Holly Frey? In August of 1914, the Leges introduced Owen to a friend of theirs, poet, essayist, and translator Laurent Taliaud. This was probably the first time Owen had met a published poet in person. Taliaud gave lectures in the nearby town of Bagniers-de-Bijon, which Owen attended. One of the subjects that naturally came up was the war.
12:08 Tracy V. Wilson? Taliaud had written at least two pacifist essays, but during one of these lectures, he framed French soldiers as fighting to defend the treasure of the French language, as well as the reason and intellect of French poets and philosophers like Voltaire and Montesquieu. He also described listening to the work of French poets in the French language as an act of patriotism. Owen would later share a similar sentiment in a letter to his mother, saying, quote, "Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote."
12:48 Holly Frey? The Leger's knew about Owen's aspirations as a poet, and they invited Taliaud to stay with them at the villa. He was there off and on for several weeks. Owen wrote to his mother that Taliaud received him like a lover, and some of his other descriptions of the poet also have this tone that could be read as erotic. We don't have the full content of these letters, though. Parts of them were heavily redacted, probably by Wilfred's brother Harold, who censored many of Wilfred's letters before they could be published or placed in archives.
13:23 Tracy V. Wilson? It is clear that Taliaud had an influence on Owen beyond their shared sentiments about the war and language and poetry. Taliaud introduced Owen to the work of French poets and writers, including Gustave Flaubert. Taliaud's own work was influenced by poets like Malarmé and Baudelaire, and Owen tried to translate some of that work into English.
13:47 Holly Frey? In September of 1914, as Madame Leger was preparing to leave for Canada, Owen and the Leger's went to Bordeaux. This is when Owen started to realize just how serious the situation with the war was. As German forces had advanced, the French government had retreated from Paris, and Bordeaux was temporarily acting as the capital. The university, where Owen had planned to take some courses, had been closed, and it was taken over by the War Ministry. The Berlitz School, where he had planned to resume teaching, had closed as well. Madame Leger left for Canada in October, and that put an end to Owen's job with the family. And at that point, he went to stay with other friends.
14:31 Tracy V. Wilson? Owen kept working on his poetry and trying to support himself through tutoring. He became increasingly conflicted about the war and whether he should go back home and enlist, although at the same time, he was concerned about whether the trip across the Channel would be more dangerous than just staying in France. He also had a series of illnesses, including one that might have been measles.
14:56 Holly Frey? Owen returned to the UK in May of 1915, not to join the military, but to represent a perfumer that he had been working for at a trade fair being held in London. He returned to France the following month. A lot of people had expected World War I to be over pretty quickly, and he didn't want to go through the drudgery of training only for the war to be over by the time he was done. He finally decided that if the Dardanelle Strait was still held by the Ottoman Empire in September of 1915, he would return home and enlist. We talked about this strait and its strategic importance in our episode on the Gallipoli Campaign, which was the Allied effort to take control of the strait
15:39 Holly Frey? and occupy the Ottoman capital of Constantinople. That episode came out on November 30, 2015.
15:47 Tracy V. Wilson? The Dardanelle Strait was not open by that September. The Gallipoli Campaign was a failure for the Allies, and it ended in a series of nighttime evacuations that started in December of 1915. By that point, Wilfred Owen had gone back to England and joined the army, and we will get to that after a sponsor break.
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18:17 Holly Frey? We've all done it. Tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends. Not to cancel them, not to hype them
19:01 Holly Frey? more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
19:20 Tracy V. Wilson? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jesay have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So, listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends,
20:04 Tracy V. Wilson? proving that queer joy only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
20:25 Tracy V. Wilson? At the very beginning of World War I, the UK had been somewhat divided on the question of whether to become actively involved in the war. Opinions shifted through July and early August of 1914, with Britain declaring war on Germany on August 4th of that year, after Germany's declarations of war against Russia and France. Britain called for volunteers to increase the size of its military, and initially, that response had been really enthusiastic. But a year later, there was no end to the war in sight, and enlistment numbers had really plummeted. Britain would eventually have to conscript soldiers
21:06 Tracy V. Wilson? to make up for immense losses due to illnesses, injuries, and death. But in the meantime, men who had not enlisted were facing enormous pressure to do so, and criticism for having not done it already. This was really everywhere. It was in newspapers and recruitment posters and other government propaganda, and conversations with friends and family, and even sometimes just comments from random passersby.
21:36 Holly Frey? If Wilfred Owen had returned to England and tried to enlist shortly after the start of the war, he probably would have been rejected. He was just a little over 5 feet 5 inches tall, and in September of 1914, authorities had raised the minimum height limit to 5 foot 6 to help deal with the surge of prospective recruits. The height minimum had later been lowered again, and it was 5 foot 2 by the time he arrived at the London headquarters of the Artists Rifles on October 20, 1915, for a physical. And he was sworn in the next day.
22:11 Tracy V. Wilson? The Artists Rifles had been founded by art student Edward Starling in 1859. As that name suggests, it was originally a volunteer regiment for artists. By this point, it had evolved into an officer-training regiment. When Owen had been in London for that trade fair, he had seen an announcement saying that gentlemen returning from abroad could earn a commission through the Artists Rifles, subject to their age and their fitness.
22:41 Holly Frey? After finishing his officer-training, Owen was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment, and not long after that, he was deployed to France. His initial letters home sound optimistic and almost cheerful about being there, although not so much about the enlisted men he was supposed to be leading. As we mentioned earlier, he was a sensitive person. He was thoughtful and bookish, and while his family hadn't had the money to send him to university, he still had more education than most British men his age. He described his men with terms like "hard-headed," "loudish," and "ugly," but he was also confident that he could trust them in combat.
23:23 Holly Frey? And he seems to have earned their respect, in part, by being a very good shot.
23:28 Tracy V. Wilson? Owen wrote numerous letters to his mother and to other people, but especially to his mother, while he was in the army. And they had worked out some codes ahead of time so that he could get around the censors who were reviewing all the mail. For example, in letters that he wrote himself, he would use the word "mistletoe," and then specific letters from the following words would spell out his location.
23:55 Tracy V. Wilson? They also agreed on a use for pre-printed British Army Field Service postcards. These had spaces for the soldier's name and the date of the last letter that soldier had received from the person they were writing to. Those were the only things allowed to be written on the card. Everything else was communicated through crossing out the lines that were not applicable. So these cards were pretty optimistic in their framing. The first line was, "I am quite well." And while the next section was about being hospitalized, the options for how the soldier was doing in the hospital were either, "And am going on quite well," or, "And hope to be discharged soon."
24:37 Tracy V. Wilson? Owen and his mother had agreed that if he was being sent to the front, he would send her one of these postcards, and he would have the line, "I am being sent down to the base," struck out twice.
24:49 Holly Frey? The tone of Owen's letters changed very quickly once he got into the trenches and as his unit held advance posts ahead of British lines. At one point, he wrote to his mother, quote, "I have suffered seventh hell. I have not been at the front. I have been in front of it." He wrote about the makeshift facilities, the cold, the wet, and the mud which got into his sleeping bag, and in the words of a letter from January of 1917, "That holy of holies my pajamas."
25:21 Tracy V. Wilson? On January 12th of 1917, Owen's men were hit with a gas attack, which he later memorialized in one of his best-known poems, Dulce et Decorum Est. Even before the gruesomeness of the gas, this poem describes the soldiers in the trenches as, quote, "Bent double like old beggars under sacks, knock-kneed, coughing like hags." When the gas hits and somebody can't get his gas mask on in time, he's described as drowning, as under a green sea. We will return to this poem later.
25:57 Holly Frey? In March of 1917, Owen was injured during the Battle of the Somme. He fell through a shell hole into a cellar, and he got a concussion, and he was trapped in that space for three days. Then, in April, while his men were trying to hold a railroad line, he had a horrific experience in which he was blown off an embankment by a shell, and he landed among the dismembered remains of another officer who had been his friend. Owen had to spend days sheltering there under a piece of corrugated iron.
26:29 Tracy V. Wilson? After this, Owen started showing signs of shell shock. This term was likely coined in 1915 by Charles Myers of the Royal Army Medical Corps. Some people today describe shell shock as post-traumatic stress disorder. And while shell shock and PTSD are both responses to trauma, only some of the symptoms overlap. These include nightmares, flashbacks, and intrusive thoughts. A lot of the other symptoms of shell shock seemed really physical, like being not able to stop shaking or being unable to speak or move or see or hear, as well as confusion and delirium.
27:12 Holly Frey? Initially, many soldiers experiencing shell shock were accused of cowardice or malingering. Some were court martialed and even executed for cowardice or desertion. Even as more doctors became convinced that shell shock was a real condition that required treatment, there were still people who insisted that shell shock soldiers were just cowards. One theory about shell shock's cause was that it was connected to prolonged exposure to the incessant sounds of German shells. So by December of 1916, the British Army had set up four specialized treatment centers, well away from the sounds of battle. By 1917, these had been completely overwhelmed. And by the end of the war,
27:57 Holly Frey? about 80,000 British soldiers had been diagnosed with shell shock.
28:02 Tracy V. Wilson? Owen was admitted to a series of hospitals starting in May of 1917, ultimately winding up at Craig Lockhart Hydropathic in Edinburgh, which had become Craig Lockhart War Hospital for neurosensical officers. Dr. A.J. Brock was one of four medical officers there, and he was treating his patients through what he called occupational therapy or ergotherapy or work cure. Brock wrote, quote, "If the essential thing for the patient to do is to help himself, the essential thing for the doctor to do, indeed, the only thing he can profitably do, is to help him to help himself." Patients were expected to engage with the world around them through activity and
28:47 Tracy V. Wilson? useful work. Brock arranged for the patients to do things like teach or work on nearby farms during their convalescence.
28:55 Holly Frey? One of Owen's jobs was editing the hospital magazine, The Hydra. The magazine itself was also a form of treatment. When patients found themselves without anything to do, they were encouraged to write something, including writing about their war experiences. This also had the effect of allowing patients to process what had happened to them through writing, while many other hospitals treating shell shock were advising patients not to think about it and to focus on pleasant things instead.
29:26 Tracy V. Wilson? While Owen was at Craig Lockhart, another patient arrived, and that was poet and writer Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon did not have shell shock. He had been declared mentally unfit to serve after writing a statement, a pretty strong statement against the war, which was dated June 15, 1917. That statement began, quote, "I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it." Sassoon wrote that he believed that the war had started as one of defense and liberation, but had become one of aggression
30:07 Tracy V. Wilson? and conquest. This statement really caused a furor, including being read before the House of Commons and printed in The London Times, and of course, Sassoon being sent to the hospital.
30:21 Holly Frey? Owen had written some similar sentiments to his mother in a letter that April, in which he expressed bitterness, quote, "towards those in England who might relieve us and will not." And he also admired Sassoon greatly. Sassoon was about seven years older than Owen, and he was already a published poet. During his military service, Sassoon's writing had become grittier and more realistic, and had pushed back on the idea of military service as heroic and romanticized. While at Craig Lockhart, Owen and Sassoon worked on poems together. There are handwritten drafts surviving today in which you can see Owen's original words, along with Sassoon's edits and suggestions, which often made Owen's language more direct and forceful.
31:07 Tracy V. Wilson? One of the poems that evolved through Sassoon's feedback is another of Owen's most well-known, and that's Anthem for Doomed Youth, which was published posthumously in 1920. "What passing bells for those who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns, only the stuttering rifle's rapid rattle can patter out their hasty orisons. No mockeries now for them, no prayers nor bells, nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, the shrill demented choirs of wailing shells and bugles calling for them from sad shires. What candles may be held to speed them all?
31:49 Tracy V. Wilson? Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes. The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall, their flowers the tenderness of patient minds, and each slow dusk a drawing down of blinds."
32:06 Holly Frey? Tracy mentioned at the top of the show that Owen's work also was part of a shift in how British poets were writing about war. You can compare Anthem for Doomed Youth to Rupert Brooke's The Soldier, which is a lot more patriotic and romanticized. Brooke had joined the Navy at the start of the war, and he died of sepsis on April 23, 1915, while on the way to the Dardanelle Strait in preparation for the Gallipoli Campaign. The Soldier was published posthumously, and it reads, "If I should die, think only this of me: that there's some corner of a foreign field that is forever England. There shall be in that rich earth a richer dust concealed, a dust whom England bore,
32:49 Holly Frey? shaped, made aware, gave once her flowers to love, her ways to roam, a body of England's breathing English air, washed by the rivers, blessed by sons of home. And think this heart, all evil shed away, a pulse in the eternal mind no less, gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given, her sights and sounds, dreams happy as her day, and laughter learnt of friends and gentleness in hearts at peace, under an English heaven."
33:21 Tracy V. Wilson? It is also very pro-England in a way that Wilfred Owen's poems really were not. Wilfred Owen did recover during his time at Craig Lockhart, and we will talk about his return to the front after another sponsor break.
33:39 Holly Frey? We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep, but what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.
34:22 Holly Frey? Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
34:43 Tracy V. Wilson? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane, navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy
35:28 Tracy V. Wilson? only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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37:53 Tracy V. Wilson? By October of 1917, Wilfrid Owen had recovered enough to be approved to return to light duty. He remained in England, and while he was on leave in London, he met journalist and art gallery owner, Robert Baldwin Ross, known as Robbie. Ross was as openly gay as it was possible to be in Britain in the early 20th century, at which point homosexuality was both a crime and very heavily stigmatized. According to some reports, Ross was the first man Oscar Wilde ever had a sexual experience with, and Wilde was, of course, sentenced
38:30 Tracy V. Wilson? to two years of hard labor for gross indecency for homosexual conduct in 1895. Ross became one of Owen's mentors, and later his literary executor, and also introduced him to other poets and writers, including Arnold Bennett and H.G. Wells.
38:48 Holly Frey? During his time at Craig Lockhart and the months that followed, Owen felt that he had been reborn as a poet. On New Year's Eve of 1917, he wrote a letter to his mother that said in part, quote, "I am started. The tugs have left me. I feel the great swelling of the open sea taking my galleon."
39:08 Tracy V. Wilson? In early 1918, Owen drafted a poem called "Shadwell's Stare." This is a real set of stairs on the bank of the River Thames, which lead down into the water. This is in a part of London's East End that Owen is known to have visited, and it also had a reputation as a cruising area for men who were seeking out other men, which is one interpretation for the poem, which goes this way. "I am the ghost of Shadwell's Stare, along the wharves by the water-house, and through the cavernous slaughter-house. I am the shadow that walks there. Yet I have flesh both firm and cool, and eyes tumultuous as the gems of moons and lamps in the full Thames, when
39:51 Tracy V. Wilson? dusk sails wavering down the pool. Shuttering the purple street arc burns, where I watch always from the banks, dolorously the shipping clanks, and after me a strange tide turns. I walk till the stars of London wane, and dawn creeps up the Shadwell's Stare. But when the crowing sirens blare, I with another ghost am lane."
40:17 Holly Frey? In July of 1918, Wilfred Owen was declared fit for general service. Of course, a lot of people in his life did not want him to go back into combat. Some actually tried to find alternative assignments for him in England. Siegfried Sassoon, who had already returned to combat and then been sent back to England to recover from a head injury, even threatened to stab Owen in the leg to keep him from going back to the front. After Owen's experience with shell shock, his family especially worried about his mental state. But he dismissed this in a letter to his mother, which also spelled out his reasons for wanting to go back to the front. Quote, "My nerves are in perfect order.
40:59 Holly Frey? I came out again in order to help these boys, directly by leading them as well as an officer can, indirectly by watching their sufferings, that I may speak of them as well as a pleader can."
41:11 Tracy V. Wilson? Owen was back at the front with his old battalion by September of 1918. He had already described himself as reborn as a poet, and he also appeared changed as a soldier. He seemed to have numbed himself to the horrors of war, which is another thing he wrote about in his poetry. He had become intensely efficient and adept at command. He was later awarded the Military Cross for actions that took place on October 1st and 2nd, 1918. His citation for conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty read, quote, "On the company
41:50 Tracy V. Wilson? commander becoming a casualty, he assumed command and showed fine leadership and resisted a heavy counterattack. He personally manipulated a captured enemy MG from an isolated position and inflicted considerable losses on the enemy. Throughout, he behaved most gallantly."
42:12 Holly Frey? On November 4th, 1918, Owen's company was trying to place a temporary bridge across the Sainbur Canal on the Western Front when they came under heavy fire from German machine gunners. Owen was killed at the age of 25. One week later, almost to the hour, Germany and the Allies signed an armistice that stopped the fighting. Owen's mother received word of his death on Armistice Day as church bells were ringing to mark the end of the war.
42:44 Tracy V. Wilson? This harkened back to Owen's best-known poem, Dulce et Decorum Est, which he probably drafted at Craig Lockhart. It ends, quote, "If you could hear at every jolt the blood come gargling from the froth corrupted lungs, obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud of vile incurable sores on innocent tongues. My friend, you would not tell with such high zest to children, ardent for some desperate glory, the old lie. Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori." That line in Latin, which Owen was framing as a lie, means it is sweet and proper to die for one's country.
43:26 Holly Frey? Owen was buried at Ors Cemetery in France. His mother had lines from his poem, "The End," inscribed in his tombstone. "Shall life renew these bodies? Of a truth, all death will he enol, all tears assuage." In that poem, the last line ends with a question mark, but that's not part of the tombstone inscription, making it read like an answer rather than another question, or like a reassurance rather than doubt.
43:55 Tracy V. Wilson? Only five of Owen's poems were published during his lifetime, three in The Nation and two anonymously in The Hydra at Craig Lockhart. But he had started pulling things together to publish a collection of his work before his return to the front. After Owen's death, Siegfried Sassoon worked with Edith Sitwell to publish this collection of 23 poems that came out in 1920. Edith's brother, Osbert Sitwell, was friends with Owen and with Sassoon, and she had also published some of Owen's poems in her annual anthology called Wheels in 1919.
44:33 Holly Frey? A preface, which Owen had drafted partially in verse, began, quote, "This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them, nor is it about deeds or lands, nor anything about glory, honor, dominion, or power, except war. Above all, this book is not concerned with poetry. The subject of it is war and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity."
45:01 Holly Frey? Another part of that preface read, quote, "All the poet can do today is to warn. That is why the true poets must be truthful."
45:10 Tracy V. Wilson? In his introduction to this collection, Sassoon described Owen this way, quote, "He was a man of absolute integrity of mind. He never wrote his poems, as many war poets did, to make the effect of a personal gesture. He pitied others. He did not pity himself. In the last year of his life, he attained a clear vision of what he needed to say. And these poems survive him as his true and splendid testament."
45:38 Holly Frey? Since Owen's first collection came out after the war was over, its immediate crisis had passed. So this book came out as people were grieving and reckoning with the deaths of more than 880,000 British military personnel and more than 16,000 British civilians. Owen's poems spoke to this loss and grief and to the humanity of the soldiers in the trenches. So it really struck a chord with the reading public. Critics were not always as impressed with it, though. For example, William Butler Yeats largely dismissed it, saying, quote, "Passive suffering is not a theme for poetry." That sounds about right for Yeats. And when he edited the Oxford Book of Modern Verse in 1936, he did not include any of Owen's work.
46:24 Tracy V. Wilson? Another collection of Owen's work was published in 1931, edited by Edmund Blunden and containing 19 additional poems. Benjamin Britten also set several of Owen's war poems to music in his War Requiem, which also incorporated Latin liturgical texts. And this was first performed in 1962. The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, edited by C. Day Lewis, was published in 1963 and contained about 80 poems and fragments. War Requiem and this new edition of Owen's poems both came out as the anti-Vietnam War movement was evolving in the 1960s. And Owen's work really resonated with that movement,
47:08 Tracy V. Wilson? which became part of his legacy as a war poet.
47:12 Holly Frey? That legacy was closely guarded by Owen's family, especially his mother, who died in 1942, and his brother Harold, who died in 1971. When Harold reprinted Wilfred's Military Cross citation, he changed the part about inflicting considerable losses to the enemy, instead saying he had captured them. It was as though Harold did not want to publicize that his brother had killed other people in battle. Harold pushed back against allegations that Wilfred had been accused of cowardice by a commanding officer. That's something that is not reflected at all in his military file. It's a little unclear where this idea first came from, but it was included in the first edition
47:56 Holly Frey? of poet Robert Graves' memoir, Goodbye to All That, something that Harold tried to get him to change.
48:03 Tracy V. Wilson? Harold also made a concerted effort to dismiss the idea that Wilfred had relationships with other men. That was also something that Robert Graves included in later editions of his memoir, which described Wilfred as, quote, "an idealistic homosexual."
48:22 Tracy V. Wilson? During Wilfred's lifetime, people just noticed that his social and literary circle included a lot of men who were either believed or known to be involved with other men. And Wilfred was also never known to have had a romantic relationship with a woman. There are also lots of references to boys and lads throughout his work and beyond works like "Shadwell Stare" that we read earlier. A number of these poems can be read as having homoerotic undertones.
48:52 Holly Frey? This may have been part of why Harold blacked out part of Wilfred's letters with India Inc. before they could be published. And he actually cut out some portions with scissors, noting these passages as illegible in the printed text. Their mother also destroyed some of Wilfred's correspondence completely, including some of his letters from Siegfried Sassoon, some of which were reportedly very passionate. Sassoon married a woman in 1931 and is known to have also had a number of relationships with men.
49:25 Tracy V. Wilson? We know that a lot of people, regardless of their gender, found Owen attractive. And a number of his letters described basically being flirted with, but we just don't know with certainty whether he had a romantic or physical relationship with anybody during his lifetime. In his biography of Wilfred, Harold Owen described his brother as having, quote, "issued any complications involving sex of any sort," because such complications would, quote, "risk the lessening of his intellectual powers." We can't really take that statement as face value, though, because it's very clear that Harold Owen was taking steps to put forth a particular image of his brother.
50:09 Holly Frey? The Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin acquired some of Owen's letters, and a 2014 blog post by them describes efforts to use software to try to read through those marked out passages. If anything has come of that effort, it does not seem to have been published.
50:27 Tracy V. Wilson? That is Wilfred Owen, who I just, I want to hug.
50:31 Holly Frey? I know. My instinct is, oh, that poor, sweet kid.
50:34 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
50:35 Holly Frey? It also, I'll talk about it in behind the scenes. I won't talk about it now.
50:39 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. Um, I have listener mail from Sarah. Sarah wrote to say, "Hey, ladies, longtime fan here, first time emailing. Nice to finally meet you. I've been listening since close to the beginning, and I think I have the SYMIHC PhD. First off, thank you for your recent commentary about protecting research, the sciences, our civil servants, et cetera." The list goes on and on. "I know people have already written about this, but to reiterate, it means a lot to speak out so we're not alone as our country changes. Last week, I was thrilled with your very comprehensive national park episodes. Much like everyone says when they email, I never had a reason to write in, but I kid you not, my husband's
51:22 Tracy V. Wilson? family is hosting a once every five years reunion in Shenandoah this weekend. I guess that's not saying much, as it's the most popular vibe visitors, but I was delighted." My personal commentary to add to this note. Is that being Marylanders, we've spent a lot of time in Shenandoah. So I wanted to speak specifically to the efforts of PATC, Potomac Appalachian Trail Club and the park rangers who maintain the park and its historic properties. For reasonable prices, anyone can book an overnight stay at one of the homesteaders' original houses, which my husband and I have done many times. There are other options too, that were built by the PATC for the purposes of working within the park.
52:04 Tracy V. Wilson? But for obvious reasons, the historical ones are my personal favorites. It's a special way to thoroughly immerse yourself in the area. I should say too, it's not lost on me that these were people's homes and I consider them rather sacred. Each home has binders of their family histories you can read while you're there. And I enjoy trying to find related historic structures nearby. You can still see some gravestones and ruins of former houses, churches, et cetera, that have been almost lost. I'll specifically call out the Corbin and the Jones families, whose last living property owners were allowed to live at each home until they passed. Anyway, I wanted to share a tidbit to humanize it even further.
52:46 Tracy V. Wilson? Honor the families who lost property and thank the folks who keep the history alive, you two included. In spite of the area's complex past, it's a place to enjoy nature and remember. Thank you for reading this very long email. Pet tax is attached. This is our daughter Poppy, a poodle in honor of Holly. Hope you're both off to some fun summer activities in your various locales. And thanks again for everything you do to help us learn and grow. All my best. Sarah, thank you so much, Sarah. Um, there are a lot of local and regional hiking clubs and mountain clubs that do so much work to build and maintain trails, usually on a volunteer basis.
53:30 Tracy V. Wilson? Work that I like was not even fully aware happened by anyone other than park rangers until relatively recently in my life. If that is something that you are interested in, if you like hiking and you like the outdoors and you Maybe have never really thought about that. You can check out in your area and see if there are organizations that are doing things like trail maintenance and trail cleanup. Some of it is stuff like picking up trash, but some of it is also making sure the trails are well maintained and stay graded the way that they need to be to let water run off and not pool and flood and things like that. So also, what an adorable, what an adorable dog.
54:13 Holly Frey? Three cheers for Poppy.
54:15 Tracy V. Wilson? Yes, Poppy is kind of a, um, a light chocolate or kind of cafe au lait kind of color for a dog and has one paw on a red ball, which is super duper cute. If you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcast, we're at [email protected] . And you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you like to listen to podcasts.
54:47 Tracy V. Wilson? Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
55:01 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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