Born on 18 March 1893, Owen grew up on Merseyside. His education began at Berkhamstead Institute and continued at Shrewsbury Technical School after his family was forced to move there. Owen began experimenting with poetry at the young age of 17. After failing to secure a place at university, Owen moved to France to teach at the Berlitz English School after a year as a lay assistant. It was during late 1914 and early 1915 that Owen became increasingly aware of the scale of the First World War and returned to England to join the Artists Rifles. 1917 saw Owen's first posting to France, where he witnessed his first taste of the brutality of war. He experienced the horrors of being trapped in a dig while under bombardment; and in May he was caught in a bomb explosion and was eventually diagnosed with "bomb shock". In June 1918 Owen arrived at Craig Lockhart War Hospital, it was here that he met Siegfried Sassoon, another patient and poet. The period with Craig Lockhart was in many ways Owen's most creative, in which he wrote many of the poems for which he is known to this day. Like many of Owen's other poems, "Disabled" explores themes of war and the impact on soldiers. This poem focuses specifically on one individual and is interpreted by many as a poem that invites the reader to pity and empathize with the above-the-knee, double-amputee war hero from the loss of his legs. However, this interpretation not only ignores the social isolation of the subject that Owen directly addresses in this poem, but also fails to recognize the subject's identity as a human being as defined by language throughout the poem. 'Disabled' reveals the irony of war, the fight of a soldier for the freedom of his country who, in the middle of the page, tells the terrible reality of deaths. it is widely known that the prayers and hymns represent a celebration of the souls who have ascended to heaven, but Owen points out in this poem that the deaths on the battlefield were so horrible and unnecessary that not even religion can save these souls. Owen wants readers to know this. recognize that no harmonic music can be enjoyed through the sounds of war. "In the end, the battlefield remains 'sad' because the pain is so great that even an inanimate object could empathize and feel the pain of the soldiers' loss." Works Cited http://dsq-sds.org/ article/view/530/707 A critical analysis of "Disabled" by Wilfred Owen. Copyright 2005 by the Society for Disability Studies. (ACCESSED 5 30 2012) http://litxpert.wordpress.com/2012/03/24/poetry-analysis-disabled-wilfred-owen/ litxpert, Analysis of disabled people,