Wilfred Owen Poetry

Wilfred Owen, a World War One poet, revealed the unsettling subject matter of war by using his own personal perspective to explore the harsh brutal reality of war.

“Anthem for Doomed Youth” is one of Wilfred Owens best known poems. It’s about the fallen soldiers who didn’t receive their proper burials and it was as if the young soldiers were just sent there to die just like cattle, “for these who died as cattle”. This aimed at ww1 however I believe that this poem could be used to relate to soldiers today.

Wilfred Owen, born in 1893, was an aspiring poet and enlisted in the British army in 1915. It was only when he set foot in the trenches he realised the disguised horrors of war underneath the superficial layer of glory. The damaging encounters of war was a motivating factor for him to propagate the truths. In 1917, Owen was admitted to Craiglockhart Military hospital, diagnosed with shell shock. It was his time there which inspired him to write his poem, ‘Mental Cases’, which captures the every grim detail of war.

As an anti-war poet, Wilfred Owen uses his literary skills to express his perspective on human conflict and the wastage involved with war, the horrors of war, and its negative effects and outcomes. As a young man involved in the war himself, Owen obtained personal objectivity of the dehumanisation of young people during the war, as well as the false glorification that the world has been influenced to deliver to them. These very ideas can be seen in poems such as 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' and 'Dulce ET Decorum EST Pro Patria Mori'. Owen uses a variety of literary techniques to convey his ideas.

One is to think of war as one of the most honorable and noble services that a man can attend to for his country, it is seen as one of the most heroic ways to die for the best cause. The idea of this is stripped down and made a complete mockery of throughout both of Wilfred Owen’s poems “Dulce Et Decorum Est” and “Anthem for Doomed Youth”. Through his use of quickly shifting tones, horrific descriptive and emotive language and paradoxical metaphors, Owen contradicts the use of war and amount of glamour given towards the idea of it.

Poetry is the telling of stories from the creative and sometimes hauntingly realistic words of a poet. The world of poetry can be wonderful. It can also be saddening, exhilarating or wonderfully exciting and the most eloquent poems can leave anybody rewinding over the story of the poem for a time afterwards. Wilfred Owen was a poet who became a well renowned poet after World War I where he unfortunately died. Continuous themes in all of his poems were the horrors of war, death as a part of war and emotion and feeling during wartime of the men who go to fight, willingly or not, and his poems The Next War (Next War) and Dulce Et Decorum Est (Dulce) are both brilliant examples of these themes.

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

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.

However, the result of the War had produced some outstanding poets and Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) was a of the war poets who was widely regarded as one of the best poets of the World War One period. He wrote out of his intense personal experience and memory as a soldier and wrote with unrivalled power of the physical, moral and psychological trauma of the First World War . Heavily influenced by Keats and Shelly, a young Owen intrigued to become a poet began to absorb himself in poetry. He did not go into religious life like his mother. Instead, he left for Bordeaux, France to teach English in the Berlitz School after the war had erupted. Although he thought of himself as a `Pacifist', he enlisted in the Artist's Rifles in October 1915 and later in 1917 changed to France. There he began writing poems about his war experiences. Owen finally suffered from shell-shock in the summer of 1917 and was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital and met his friend Siegfried Sassoon, who shared his feelings about the war and who became interested in his work. Reading Sassoon's poems and discussing his work with Sassoon revolutionized Owen's style and conception of poetry .

Wilfred Owen can be considered as one of the finest war poets of all times. His war poems, a collection of works composed between January 1917, when he was first sent to the Western Front, and November 1918, when he was killed in action, use a variety of poetic techniques to allow the reader to empathise with his world, situation, emotions and thoughts. The sonnet form, para-rhymes, ironic titles, voice, and various imagery used by Owen grasp the prominent central idea of the complete futility of war as well as explore underlying themes such as the massive waste of young lives, the horrors of war, the hopelessness of war and the loss of religion. These can be seen in the three poems, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ and

Wilfred Owen uses language and poetic devices to evoke sympathy for the soldier in the poem by using in-depth descriptions. An example of this is in the first stanza where the soldier in the poem ‘shivered in his ghastly suit of grey’. The ‘g’ sound in the words ‘ghastly’ and ‘grey’ emphasises the horror of ‘ghastly’ combined with the dreariness of ‘grey’, which are now the two main features of his life. The word ‘ghastly’ shows something that is strange and unnatural. The adjective ‘grey’, which has connotations of bleakness, portrays an image of darkness and monotony. Furthermore, the verb ‘shivered’ shows that he is vulnerable and exposed. In the phrase, ‘Legless, sewn short at elbow’, the sibilance at the end of ‘Legless’, and in ‘sewn short’ tell us that the short-syllable words are ruthlessly to the point, so it emphasises the fact that the soldier has no arms and legs because of his wounds.

Wilfred Owen approaches his war poem, Dulce et Decorum est, in a negative way. In his Latin titled poem, with the translation being “It is sweet and honourable to die for one’s country” he drastically describes war in a brutal and frightening manner. His poem is filled with violent imagery and gruesome detailing of a fellow soldiers’ death, using words such as: “guttering”, “choking” and “drowning”. Owen wanted people, and possible future generations, to understand what the soldiers had to go through and that it wasn’t this amazing concept, which people back at home perceived. Where as, Rupert Brooke’s poem ‘The Soldier’ approaches war in a positive way.

Throughout Wilfred Owen’s collection of poems, he unmasks the harsh tragedy of war through the events he experienced. His poems indulge and grasp readers to feel the pain of his words and develop some idea on the tragedy during the war. Tragedy was a common feature during the war, as innocent boys and men had their lives taken away from them in a gunshot. The sad truth of the war that most of the people who experienced and lived during the tragic time, still bare the horrifying images that still live with them now. Owen’s poems give the reader insight to this pain, and help unmask the tragedy of war.

army when he was 22 years old. He was injured in a shell explosion in

Wilfred Owen is a poet that focused on the brutal effects of war and revolved his work around the theme of death, injuries, and the brutality of war. His works titled - Disabled, Miners, and Exposure - all of Owen's poems are written with an underlying attitude of despair. Owen's work uses descriptive words that usually have a connotation of sorrow and he emphasizes the presence of death many times. This is purely in order deliver the message that war is bad because it seems to only bear repercussions rather than progression.