Wilfred Owen (1893 - 1918) is arguably the greatest of the poets from World War One.  Born in 1893 in Oswestry, in Shropshire, where his father was a  railway-worker, Owen was educated in Liverpool and at Shrewsbury  Technical College.  He began to experiment with verse at an early  age and read widely.  In 1913 he left to teach English in France in  Bordeaux.  In 1915, after seeing the result of war casualties at a  field hospital in France, Owen returned to England where he joined the  army in which he was soon commissioned, and he served at the Front in N. France and Belgium. After receiving concussion and contracting trench-fever on the Somme he was invalided to Hospital in Edinburgh, where he was greatly encouraged in his writing following a meeting with the poet Siegfried Sassoon  (1886-1967). From Scotland Owen was sent to Yorkshire, first to Scarborough & later Ripon, with the 5th Manchester (reserve) Battalion.  Based in North Yorkshire from 1917 to August 1918 it was during this time that he wrote  most of his famous works and it was from here that made his final fateful journey to the Front in September 1918. Having started writing romantic and classically influenced verse, Owen found his own voice as a poet in the trenches and most of the poems for  which he is remembered were written between the summer of 1917 and the autumn of the next year while posted at Ripon and Scarborough - Dulce Et Decorum Est, Strange Meeting, The Send off, The Parable of the Old Man &  the Young, Soldier's dream, Exposure, Spring Offensive. Owen won the Military Cross in 1918 shortly before being killed on the Sambre-Ors Canal a week before the Armistice was signed ending the war.  He died on 4th November 1918 aged only 25.  Owen had only lived to see five of his 100+ poems published. On the morning of 11th November as Church bells rang out to announce the peace his mother Susan Owen received the telegram she had feared,  informing her of Wilfred's death in action. His bleak realism, energy and indignation, his compassion and his  technical skill are evident in most of his work.  He left behind over 103 poems and 675 letters, over-half written during the war.  The energy, poignancy and strength of his poems led the composer Benjamin Britten to write 'War Requiem' based on some of Owen's poems.