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The Ugliness of War in Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum est Essays

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The Ugliness of War in Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum est

Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum est" is seen as a strong expression of the ugliness of war, and "an attack on the idea of war being glorious" (Kerr 48). It transmits an irritating clip, with full animation and in vivid colors, of embittered and battered soldiers marching to their death. It also, cogently presents a nightmarish vision of hell uploading all its demons into the root directory of an impoverished soldier who saw one of his comrades gassed to death.

The images that Owen confected with the skill of a professional craftsman remain grafted in the reader's memory long after the poem is read, echoing its sober message times and times again. The soldier's voice…show more content…
In spite of his attempt at, what might seem to some critics, some colloquialism, "Knock-kneed", "coughing like hags", "blood-shod", the poem is marked by its high diction and entrancing expression that smell of the styles of previous generations of traditional poets. In short, the poem with its imitation of conventional poetic form, excellence of diction, elevated language, and persuasion effect is a paradigm of what Longinus terms the sublime in expression. A thorough examination of the poem reveals the Longinus sublimity of articulation through the use of adjuration (l. 25), asyndeton (l. 2, 3), accumulation of figures of speech (l. 1-6), hyperbaton (l. 3, 13), periphrasis (l. 4) and familiar language in its right place (l.1, 2, 9, 20). The manipulation of these figures of speech wrapped in traditional rhymes and cadences cannot possibly represent the actual idiom of a wretched, battered and embittered soldier, during an intensely traumatic moment of his life. This failure of representation confirms my suspicion that the poet at the moment of composing the text has never felt the intensity of the experience described by the traumatized soldier. It is true that Owen joined the war; and it is true that he tragically died in the front few days before the end of the war, yet he seems to have made peace with war. His published letters from the front to his family do not reflect, even from a distance, the soldier's sentiment and emotion in "Dulce et Decorum est." On
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