War poetry is a relatively new classification in the world of poetry. Stephen Crane and Wilfred Owen are two poets that have seen war first hand and have written many graphic and in-depth poems on war. The similarities in the war poetry of Stephen Crane and Wilfred Owen seem relatively minor when compared to the striking differences in imagery, symbolism and impressionism.
             Stephen Crane was born on November 1, 1871 in Newark, New Jersey. He later moves to New York and attends school for the first time. Crane's father dies and his mother moves back to New Jersey, where she dies eleven years later. Crane attends Syracuse University in New York for a year, then travels to Mexico where he publishes "The Black Riders", his first war poem. Later Crane becomes shipwrecked off the coast of Florida, which is the basis for a future book, and meets Cora Taylor, proprietress of a house of prostitution, along the way. Together they go to cover the story on the Greco-Turkish War and a year later Crane becomes a correspondent in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. Although Stephen Crane never fought in battle, his experiences in these wars influenced his later poetry on war.
             Wilfred Owen, on the other hand, was born on March 18, 1893 Oswestry. He moved to Bordeaux in 1913, as an English teacher in the Berlitz School of Languages; one year later he was a private teacher in a wealthy family in the Pyrenees. He enlisted in the Artists' Rifles and endured fourteen months of training in England. He was drafted to France and spent the next four months there, only five weeks of which were on the front line. On this is based all his war poetry. After battle experience, thoroughly shocked by horrors of war, he went to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh. In August 1918, after his friend Siegfried Sassoon had been severely injured and sent back to England, Owen returned to France where he died seven days before the armistice. Owen's exper...