Owen and Sassoon: The Edinburgh Poems

Neil McLennan is Senior Lecturer and Director of Leadership Programmes at University of Aberdeen. He started life as a history teacher and became President of the Scottish Association of Teachers of History. His interest in Wilfred Owen and the war poets started during his time as Head of History at Tynecastle High School.

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) was one of the leading poets of the First World War. His war poetry on the horrors of trenches and gas warfare was much influenced by his mentor Siegfried Sassoon and stood in contrast to the public perception of war at the time and to the confidently patriotic verse written by earlier war poets such as Rupert Brooke.

Siegfried Sassoon was born in 1886 and educated at Clare College, Cambridge. He served in the trenches during the First World War, where he began to write the poems for which he is remembered. Despatched as 'shell-shocked' to hospital, he organised public protest against the war. His poetry initially met with little response, but his reputation grew steadily in the following decades.