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Wilfred Owen's War Poetry Essay

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Wilfred Owen's War Poetry

If Wilfred Owen's war poetry had one main aim, it would be to expose
"the old lie": that war is always a good and justified thing and that it is a good thing to die for one's country. Owen had experienced first hand the horrors and tragedies of the First World War, so he inevitably wanted to break open the false façade and let the world know the truth. I am going to explore what I find to be three of his best poems and show how he achieved this aim.

Owen was born on the 18th of March 1893 in Shropshire, England. He received a good education as a child and in 1915 he enlisted in the army when he was 22 years old. He was injured in a shell explosion in
France and transferred to a war hospital back in …show more content…

Herbert Asquith wrote "The Volunteer" which was one of the most romanticised war poems of all time. It was about a young boy in a "city grey" with "no lance broken", who goes to join the army. He dies but "lies content" and euphemistically goes to join the "Men of Agincourt". These poems are incredibly full of euphemisms of war and mention no words like "pain" or "death". But when poets who thought they could find "glory and honour" in war actually arrived at the battlefields everything changed and the anti-war poems begun.

"Dulce Et Decorum Est" is arguably Wilfred Owen's most famous poem. It uses very figurative language in order to describe the horrors of a gas attack on a few men while they are "marching towards their distant rest". It is split up into three parts. The first part describes the
"men marching asleep" "towards their distant rest". The second part describes the gas attack. Most of them manage to get their gas masks on, but one man "fumbles" and "drowns". In the third part Owen describes the horror of walking behind the wagon they "flung" him into and watching him slowly and painfully dying. He then addresses Jessie
Pope as "my friend" and tells her that of she had seen what he saw; she would not tell the

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