The poems Wilfred Owen wrote from his experience in the trenches of the First World War have helped shape our understanding of that terrible conflict ever since. Owen spent months as a patient at the Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh. Some of his poems are about soldiers in a similar situation, sick, injured, distressed or dying. These verses still have a fresh and immediate resonance. Even today and at the best of times, people in hospital can still be ill, frightened and lonely. Owen wrote of ‘the pity of war’, but the compassion in his words reaches wider than that.