Brutality of the explosive action + futile waste of human life = evident from Owen’s first hand experience.
Dulce Et Decorum Est = confronts the reader with harsh imagery.
Anthem for Doomed Youth = expresses his anti war feelings.
Owen Wilfred came from a well educated, religious but not wealthy middle class family.
Has showed his love of poetry from a young age.
Failing to win scholarships for university he became a tutor in France before WW1 broke out.
He enlisted in 1915, trained as a Second Lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment, being posted in the Western Front.
He described in one letter, that no mans land was ‘pock-mocked like a body of foulest disease and its odour the breath of cancer’.
Experiencing the horrors of trench warfare,
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On November the 4th he was killed in an assault just seven days before hostilities ended.
Sassoon had written an eulogy for Owens funeral and went on to edit and publish the first collection of Owens poetry in 1920.
The poem DULCE ET DECORUM EST graphically recounts the horrifying sights, sounds and feelings that the exhausted soldiers had to deal with - while being caught in the middle of a gas attack.
In the first Stanza the visual imagery ‘Knock-Kneed, coughing like hags’ exploits the mens severe pain and utter exhaustion = showing how it visually make these men look old.
Owen Wilfred doesn't just use visual imagery to explore the futile waste of the youth in war but also sensory image ‘Someone still was yelling out and stumbling and floundering’ making us feel the heavy weight that these men must bare when they cant help each other.
During ANTHEM FOR DOOMED YOUTH he uses his graphic depiction to make it ironically confronting and memorable to us as the reader, while also emphasising the vulnerability of the youth.
Owen use of language prompts reflection by using ‘who die as cattle’ stressing the plosive ’t’ in the word cattle, conjuring up images of a