Who Wrote 'This Is Not A Place Of Honor' Originally?

I keep a tattered volume of war poetry on my shelf and every now and then I flip to a short piece credited to Wilfred Owen called 'This Is Not a Place of Honour'. It grabbed me because Owen's work cuts through propaganda; he writes like someone who saw the worst and refuses to dress it up. The phrasing is deliberately blunt, and the poem sits snugly among his other WWI classics such as 'Dulce et Decorum Est'—all of them turning ideals like glory and honour inside out.

Reading Owen feels a bit like listening to an eyewitness who won't let you look away. He uses plain words to make moral points: honour isn't automatic just because men died; context matters, and often the reasons are messy or pointless. That attitude made his poems controversial at the time, and many weren't widely published until after he died in 1918. For any modern reader curious about the original source, anthologies of World War I poetry or collected editions of Owen's work will have it. Personally, this line is one I find myself thinking of whenever national rhetoric flirts with romanticizing sacrifice—it's a sobering counterweight that keeps me grounded.

I get a real kick out of chasing down phrases that stick in your head, and 'this is not a place of honor' is one of those lines that feels like it should have a clear origin—but it doesn’t point to a single, obvious author the way a Shakespeare or Tolkien quote would. The wording itself reads like an echo from war poetry or a hard-bitten memoir: a blunt refusal of pomp when confronted with suffering or death. You’ll find sentences with almost the same sentiment scattered across 19th- and 20th-century writing—especially in works reacting to war, social injustice, or institutional hypocrisy. Writers like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon made careers of stripping the word 'honour' of its romantic gloss in poems such as 'Dulce et Decorum Est' and 'Anthem for Doomed Youth', and that same critical tone is what makes the phrase feel so familiar even if it’s not a direct quote from them.

If you hunt the phrase in databases, anthologies, and library catalogs, what shows up most often is usage rather than a single first appearance: journalists use it to condemn hollow ceremonies, novelists slip it into scenes where institutions demand respect but don’t earn it, and biographers or memoirists sometimes use it when describing funerals or monuments that feel undeserved. That means there isn’t a neat, universally-agreed “original” author to point at in the way there is with, say, a trademarked catchphrase. Instead, it’s a pithy construction—simple words arranged in a way that captures a common human judgment—so it reappears in many voices independently. You can trace thematic cousins in a lot of anti-war or anti-establishment pieces across eras: the sentiment that public honor can be hollow, and that certain places and rituals are not worthy of the word, is a recurring literary move.

For anyone trying to pin down provenance, my practical tip is to look for the earliest printed instance in digitized newspaper archives, Google Books, or periodical indexes if you want a first-known citation. But from a reader’s point of view, what matters more is how the phrase lands: it cuts through ritualized respect and forces you to evaluate whether honor is being given to something truly honorable. That’s why it keeps turning up. Personally, I love the way it reads—so lean and judgmental, and somehow both literary and conversational—so even without a single named origin it still feels like one of those powerful little lines that writers reach for when they want to puncture pretense.

Short and reflective, my take: the phrase comes from Wilfred Owen, the English war poet whose blunt, bitter lines reshaped how we talk about WWI. 'This Is Not a Place of Honour' is one of his pieces that strips away ceremonial language and forces you to face the rawness of death in war. Owen’s voice is both precise and unforgiving—he wrote from the front and was killed in 1918, so much of his power comes from lived experience. When I read his poetry now, I still feel that cold little punch: a reminder that words like honour and glory need close inspection, especially when people use them to justify bloodshed. It’s the kind of line that keeps resonating because whether in literature class or a quiet evening read, it stops you from accepting comfortable stories about war without asking hard questions.

Bright and impatient, I'll say it plainly: the line 'this is not a place of honor' traces back to Wilfred Owen. He wrote a short, haunting piece often referred to as 'This Is Not a Place of Honour' (note the original British spelling) during World War I, and it carries that bitter, ironic tone Owen is known for. That blunt phrasing—denying 'honour' to the scene of death—fits right alongside his more famous works like 'Dulce et Decorum Est' and 'Anthem for Doomed Youth'. Owen's poems were forged in the trenches; he scribbled them between bombardments and hospital stays, and many were published posthumously after his death in 1918.

What always hooks me about that line is how economical and sharp it is. Owen used straightforward language to overturn received myths about war and glory. When I first encountered it, maybe in a poetry anthology or a classroom booklet, I remember being impressed by how the words served as a moral slap: a reminder that cemeteries and battlefields aren't stages for patriotic spectacle. The poem isn’t long, but it reframes everything—honour as a label that's often misapplied, and death as something ordinary and undeserving of romantic gloss. If you like exploring more, look at collections of Owen's poems where editors often group this one with his other anti-war pieces; the contrast between Owen’s clinical detail and lyrical outrage is always striking.

Even now I find that line rattling around my head when I read modern war literature or watch films that deal with heroism. It’s one of those phrases that keeps reminding you to look past slogans and face the human cost. For me, it never stops being both beautiful and painfully plain, which is probably why it stuck around in common memory.