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Theme Of Anthem For Doomed Youth By Wilfred Owen

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A Shakespearean sonnet contains fourteen lines, structured with three quatrains, each containing four lines, and ending with a rhyming couplet written usually dominated by an iambic pentameter, which consists of ten syllables divided into five pairs, the iambs, with an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one. Anthem for doomed youth corresponds to the structure of the Shakespearean sonnet. Another structural element usually included in a Shakespearean sonnet is the rhyming scheme ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, with Anthem for doomed youth’s only deviation being the EFFE. As Wilfred Owen’s poem contains the required elements of the Shakespearean sonnet, it can evidently be said it should be placed in the genre.

Another characteristic of the Shakespearean sonnets is that it commonly revolves around the lovers theme, take …show more content…

As the war continued, and the army’s numbers needed to increase, various pro-war propaganda were made, and poets like Jessie Pope and Robert Graves, who knew very little of the reality of war, would contribute with poems romanticising war and the life of a soldier. Wilfred Owen had experienced the war first-hand, and had spent years of his life in the harsh, filthy, and dangerous conditions in the trenches, digging new trenches, repairing old ones, carting equipment and supplies, or spending long hours on sentry duty or on listening posts, or fighting the enemies. He eventually had been so influenced and terrified by those circumstances, he was sent off to hospital for treatment of shell shock, where he composed poems to not only process the horrors he dealt with daily as a soldier, but to shame those oblivious war-supporting poets and bring the real image of war into light for the young men applying to the army as he was outraged by the support of the war from those who had never been to the

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