Wilfred Owen Research Paper

The confronting opinions of Wilfred Owen centre around the effects of human conflict, giving responders the ability to open their eyes to the reality of the new type of war and it’s impact on the soldiers and the broader society. The horrors and agony that Owen faced during World War 1 forced him to begin writing to warn and teach those on the home front the disgusting nature of war to relinquish the romantic view that society had of it. In the poems ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’, and ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, as well as the stimulus video ‘The Great War and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century. Wilfred Owen’ , It is clearly expressed that the technologically advanced warfare was far more devastating than anything before it, where no heroism was

In a letter to his sister shown in the stimulus, Owen recounts the moment he was left with the remains of a fellow soldier, “who [ laid ] not only nearby but in various places around and about”, it is events like these that destroy the soldier's psyche. In ‘Dulce’, Owen shows his own crushed mental state, through the continuous use of present participles such as “guttering, choking, drowning”, which show that these events are continuously happening in Owen’s mind, reliving the nightmares, and as the stimulus states, these images “couldn’t go away”, it “saps the soldierly spirit”. The horrors seen in war stay with the soldiers, they experience tragedies that youth should not witness. This is shown again in ‘Dulce’ as the soldiers are referred to as different things throughout the poem such as “old beggars”, “Men”, “boys”, and finally “children”. This change of diction used to describe the soldiers reminds audiences what they really are compared to what they have experienced. The connotations of these words such as ‘old’ and ‘men’ give the impression of experienced and mature, which is what they are after returning from what they have seen, whereas it moves to ‘boys’ and ‘children’, which is what they are, young and “innocent”, living once “happy” lives as Owen once wrote to his mother in the stimulus, but now in “agony” and often desensitised

Owen was only “one in nine million killed”, nearly every family in England was affected, and soon after people began realising the devastation of the war. Owen not only shows the effect war had on the homefront, but allows audiences to empathise with the families and friends of the dead. This is done in ‘Anthem’, where the sonnet’s volta of “And bugles calling for them from sad shires”, changes the focus from the battlefield to the home-front, where the morning of the innocent “boys” and “girls” take place. Throughout the sestet we see the effects on the homefront, however it is only in the last lines where we see the full scale of the devastation. The rhyming couplet of the line “Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds, And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds”,creates a dramatic effect or a punchline to emphasise the metaphor being used, the traditional ritual of ‘drawing-down of blinds’ is by the going down of the sun, implying everyone is drawing down their blinds. These deaths continued and continued, fueled by the propaganda which Owen tried to warn others about, the title of his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est”, meaning “It is sweet and honourable”, is an allusion to the roman poet Horace , it however is ironic and a lie, as John Keegan states in the stimulus that the