How Does Wilfred Owen Respond To The Dehumanization Of Other Soldiers?

Wilfred Owen's war poems central features include the wastage involved with war, horrors of war and the physical effects of war. These features are seen in the poems "Dulce Et Decorum Est" and "Anthem for Doomed Youth" here Owen engages with the reader appealing to the readers empathy that is felt towards the soldier. These poems interact to explore the experiences of the soldiers on the battlefields including the realities of using gas as a weapon in war and help to highlight the incorrect glorification of war. This continuous interaction invites the reader to connect with the poems to develop a more thorough

line with the way that Owen is conveying the 'Pity of War' but he also

Wilfred Owens poem “Dulce et Decorum est” and Bruce Dawe’s poem “Homecoming” are poems from different wars, however both highlight the indignity of war. Owen’s poem is broken up into three sections, where he expresses the torture soldiers suffer

The soldiers who had attended the war were shown to have died brutally, like “cattle”, yet when reaching the home front, it is seen that they are laid to rest in a much more civil and dignified manner. The concept of this can be seen as an extended metaphor throughout the entire poem, with the battle front seen as a world filled with violence, fear and destruction, where as the home front is perceived as a place marked by order and ritual, a civilized world. The second sonnet opens with “What candles may be held to speed them all?”, invoking a more softer and compassionate tone towards the audience, more specifically through Owen’s use of a rhetorical question. It captures the readers’ attention, engaging them to feel empathetic and notice the shift of energy from anger and bitterness to a sadder and more somber tone. Owen’s use of descriptive language, as simple as it seems, such as ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ provokes the audience to view the horrors of the war as if they had been placed onto children, because in reality the ‘men; who had signed themselves into war to fight in glory for their country had really only just been boys themselves.

The purpose of war is again in question through the ironic titles evidenced in most of Owen’s poems. In ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’, the sweet and fitting death is contrasted against the bitter and

Wilfred Owen’s poetry effectively conveys his perspectives on human conflict through his experiences during The Great War. Poems such as ‘Futility’ and ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ portray these perceptions through the use of poetic techniques, emphasising such conflicts involving himself, other people and nature. These themes are examined in extreme detail, attempting to shape meaning in relation to Owen’s first-hand encounters whilst fighting on the battlefield.

Ok what I have got here today is a detailed speech and I intend to explain two poems “Disabled” and “Dolce et Decorum est.”, both written by Wilfred Owen. I would choose these two poems to be in an anthology because I found the poems to be very dramatic and extremely detailed. Owen intends to shock us by demonstrating what a soldier might expect in a situation between life and death. He is not afraid to show his own feelings. Wilfred Owen is an anti-war poet and expresses his ideas and feelings through various themes and poetic devices which I will be discussing throughout this speech.

This image is definitely not the glamorous picture of glory that, say army recruitment presents; worse, the soldiers are doing worse than civilians. As soon as the next stanza “[m]en marched asleep. Many had lost their boots” (5). They have lost their usual awareness and move mechanically; that doesn’t sound appealing! It gets worse: “[b]ut limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind” (6). So now they’re limping, apparently wounded, covered in blood, and can’t even see? It worsens further, “[d]runk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots/ Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind” (7-8). The soldiers are so exhausted it incapacitates them, and they can no longer hear the bullets being fired. This poem sounds like a distorted nightmare, except the speaker is living it, and even reliving the torment of the soldier’s death while he is unconscious. Owen’s wording expresses that the soldiers are merely men, deteriorating and inconceivably overwhelmed the opposite of positive war poetry containing glory and honor.

How does Owen’s portrayal of the relationship between youth and war move us to a deeper understanding of suffering?

Owen personifies death, giving him readily identifiable human characteristics as spitting and coughing, but in a way that accords with the gruesome nature of death since he spits “bullets” and coughs “shrapnel.” What is really striking is that the soldiers welcome death's claim of their lives; they “chorused if he sang aloft” and “whistled while he shaved [them] with his scythe.” Although evoking the death-as-a-reaper conceptualization,

Wilfred Owen’s porter vividly depicts the horror and futility of war and the detrimental impact of war upon the soldiers. Owen’s poem, ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’, written in 1917 depicts the horror of war as the physical and mental damages on the solders. Most importantly, the context of the poem subverts its title. In his other poem, ‘Futility’ written in 1918, conveys war as fatal and that war is pure wastage of human lives.

War is not heroic. War is sickness, struggle, and death. This is the message that poet and World War I soldier Wilfred Owen wanted to instill in his people back home. Those back home talked of glory and national pride and rooted for their soldiers, however, they were unaware of the horrors these soldiers witnessed and experienced. The soldiers and their people back home were not only separated by distance but by mental barriers, which Owen showcases in his poetry. Owen’s use of personification in “Anthem for Doomed Youth” degrades the soldiers to objects to show how the war dehumanized them to intentionally create a disconnect between the audience and the soldiers.

Owen’s poem has the clear intention of showing the true nature of war to the reader, which is mainly achieved by contrasting reality against the ways in which war is so

During his time serving in the war, Wilfred Owen was able to capture many ideas, concepts, and perceptions that cleverly portrayed into his poems. Even the Sassoon had an impression that Owen, no matter what, had complete dedication and “he passionately wanted to survive the war, so that he might continue to write poetry.. he showed himself as …an increasingly self-critical one.” Owen was quite dedicated to his work and he let nothing go past him. His sentiment to the war was a recurring speech that echoed his very thoughts. In one of his poems, the Sentry, Owens uses the words “Hammered”, “choked”, “murk..”, and “whizz-bangs” to establish the reality of war and what those soldiers are put through. This is in contrast with the word “coaxing”, which shifts the attention away from reality to more of Owen’s altruism and ‘appearance’ that the man is able to survive. The onomatopoeia used in the second stanza present a sudden push into reality, such as “thud! Flump! Thud!”. This sudden jump also supplies information on how difficult it was to navigate through the war zone. In the third stanza, Owen switches to a form of fate, in which he relates how this may have been the fate of the man. He forms these thoughts with words phrases such as “wild chattering”, “crumps”, “Pummelled”, or “slogged the air”, that imply how the feeling of dread metaphorically listens for these words before “striking”. The Sentry is quite different from any of the other poems that Wilfred Owen has written in that it seems to be centered around internal dialogue rather than just him laying out details and interpretations of events. The specific dialogue he

Wilfred Owen was a Teacher, Soldier, and Poet. He was born in 1893 in Oswestry, England. In 1911, he passed the entrance exam for University of London but could not afford it without a scholarship. In exchange for housing Owen became a vicar’s assistant near Reading. He then attended the University of Reading studied there. When the war started, Owen was an English teacher in Bordeaux. He did not rush back to England to enlist but did enlist in June on 1916. In 1917, his service had led to shellshock and forced him to return home from the front. It was during this time he was being cared for in Craiglockhart hospital and met his friend and mentor Siegfried Sassoon and wrote most of his now well-known poems. This time away from the front and the then-experimental therapy being used at the hospital helped Owen recover enough to return to the front a year later. Owen and his men were an essential part of taking the Hindenburg line in 1918 and he was awarded the military cross. Sadly, little under a month later Owen was killed crossing a canal at Ors and only saw four of his poems published. The focus of this essay is to show how this amazing writer used poetic devices to tell people away from the front the horrors of war. Owen used many devices in his poetry and this essay will focus on three onomatopoeia, alliteration, and Simile.