Owen was born and brought up chiefly in Shropshire, England. After failing to get into university, he worked for a vicar and then in France as an English teacher before enlisting at the beginning of World War I at the age of 21.

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Much of Owen's earliest poetry is in the homoerotic tradition that includes Shelley's "Adonais," Tennyson's In Memoriam, and A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad: poems that simultaneously celebrate and mourn the beauty of a dead young man.

Owen tried initially to combine this tradition with the religiosity of his upbringing. In "The Time was Aeon," Jesus Christ is depicted as a beautiful, suffering boy. As he grew older, Owen cared less and less for organized religion. "Maundy Thursday" describes churchgoers kissing the cross during a service; the narrator kisses the hands of the boy who holds the cross.

Ultimately, it was war poetry that was to give him a socially acceptable way to express his erotic feelings for other men.

Owen went to France as an officer at the end of 1916. In June 1917, he was sent back to England suffering from shellshock. He went to a hospital near Edinburgh, where he met the bisexual poet Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon encouraged Owen to think of himself as a poet. It was perhaps at Sassoon's suggestion that Owen reread "Adonais" and read the Greek elegies.

Sassoon also gave Owen an introduction to homosexual literary circles in London. Through him, Owen met Oscar Wilde's friend Robbie Ross, the poet Osbert Sitwell, and Charles Scott Moncrieff, the translator of Proust.

Owen's use of consonance and near-rhymes, possibly adapted from Gerard Manley Hopkins's experiments in technique, had been one of the distinctive features of his poetry since well before the meeting with Sassoon. Furthermore, Owen had already begun to combine the homoeroticism latent in elegy with precise observation of the horror of trench warfare.

Poems like "Anthem for Doomed Youth," "Greater Love," "Strange Meeting," "Dulce et Decorum Est," "Arms and the Boy," and "Disabled" are written in the elegiac mode but also contain details that ground the poetry in the daily experience of the poet and of his comrades.

Just as Owen's prosody and diction are based on traditional models that they then subvert, so Owen's best poetry takes the elegy as its point of departure only to finish by being both more personal and more political than the traditional elegy. Owen never forgot that he was writing about real boys and men dying all around him every day. He tried to write in a poetic language that would retain the Keatsian style he admired while it vividly expressed violence, sorrow, and rage; in his best poems, he succeeds brilliantly.

In the end, Owen became one of the boys he wrote about. He returned to France at the end of August 1918. In early October, he participated in an attack for which he received the Military Cross. Wilfred Owen was killed on November 4, 1918; the news reached his parents as the bells rang to celebrate the Armistice.

Owen published only five poems in his lifetime. Within a few years of his death, he had come to be regarded as one of the best of the war poets; he has only recently begun to be discussed as a homosexual poet. At the end of World War II, Benjamin Britten used some of Owen's poems in his War Requiem; the requiem was filmed in 1988 by Derek Jarman.

A poetic response to the death of a greatly loved person, the elegy has had since classical times a homoerotic component.

Homosexuality, both male and female, has a rich, divergent, and increasingly open expression in the literature of the twentieth century.

From ancient times, homoerotic writing has been a notable part of the literature of war.

In some of the most original poetry of the Victorian period, the sexually-repressed Gerard Manley Hopkins celebrated male beauty as one of the most splendid witnesses to the divine.

A. E. Housman's poetry is inextricably rooted in homosexual experience and consciousness and is also a significant reflector of gay history.

In both his films and his writings, Derek Jarman's explicit project was to celebrate gay sexuality and imagine a place for it in English culture.

Marcel Proust is the author of A la recherche du temps perdu, one of the major achievements of Modernism and a great gay novel.

For war poet and memoirist Siegfried Sassoon, the grueling years of World War I left an indelible impression of devastation and futility that colored his entire life.

Although he was sexually attracted to women, Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote poetry suffused with homoeroticism, including the most beautiful homoerotic elegy in the English language.

Oscar Wilde is important both as an accomplished writer and as a symbolic figure who exemplified a way of being homosexual at a pivotal moment in the emergence of gay consciousness.