The Two Owens

The Owens brothers were born in Shropshire, in western England on the Welsh border of a cultivated but impoverished middle class provincial family. One of them would come to be among the most important English language poets of the Twentieth Century. The elder one, died in battle at the age of twenty-five in the closing days of World War I. The younger survived the perils of merchant marine service and sea warfare and lived into old age to tell their story.