This poem, Inspection, was written by Wilfred Owen in 1918 the year before he died when he was in the First World War. The poem isa 3-stanza poem, about an inspection by a commanding officer, almostcertainly, Owen himself, and the reactions of an ord...
This poem, Inspection, was written by Wilfred Owen in 1918 the year before he died when he was in the First World War. The poem is a 3-stanza poem, about an inspection by a commanding officer, almost certainly, Owen himself, and the reactions of an ordinary soldier.
Inspections were very important to the British army, reinforcing the need for certain standards and discipline. I think that Owen is pointing out that inspections are unnecessary, and that this particular inspection was unfair upon the individual soldier.
Owen was educated in London; after an illness in 1913 he lived in France. He had already begun to write, while working as a tutor near Bordeaux. In 1915 Owen enlisted in the British army. The experience of trench warfare brought changed him a lot. The poems written after January 1917 are full of anger at war's brutality, an elegiac pity for "those who die as cattle," and a rare descriptive power. In June 1917 he was wounded and sent home. While in a hospital near Edinburgh he met the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who shared his feelings about the war and who became interested in his work. Reading Sassoon's poems and discussing his work with Sassoon revolutionized Owen's style and his conception of poetry. Despite the plans of well-wishers to find him a staff job, he returned to France in August 1918 as a company commander. He was awarded the Military Cross in October and was killed a week before Armistice Day which was on November 11th 1918.
