He said his main concern was ‘war and the pity of war’ He felt it was his responsibility as a poet to tell the truth and bring to light to atrocities of modern warfare, in a way others could or would not. Once he had properly experienced war his poetry became a form of education, he wanted to expose the belief war was good and noble and prove wrong the propaganda that bombarded Britain. No knowledge, imagination or military training could properly prepare Owen for the reality of war and the suffering of front line experience it brought along with it. Within twelve days of arriving in France the ‘easy-going’ chatter of his letters turned to a ‘cry of anguish’. ‘The Sentry’ was written by Owen when he was receiving treatment at Craiglockhart in Edinburgh in 1917, finished in September later that year whilst in France.
How do different poems portray different attitudes to war? Wilfred Owens’s poem ‘’Dulce et decorum est’’, aims to transmit the human elements and the reality and irony of war, or as he said ‘’ my object is war and the pity of war, the poetry is in the pity’’. Owen portrays the idea of war as a cause of physical and spiritual mutilation. Jessie popes poem ‘’ who’s for the game?’’ attempts to encourage young man to go and fight at war. All through out the poem she is trying to put pressure on those who don’t want to go to war.
With no real purpose but to be mindlessly massacred. Through personification, the guns responsible for taking so much human life are made out to be monstrous, even evil. The poem also likens their deaths to a funeral, but one where the bells are shots, and the mourning choirs are the army's bugles. The drawing down of the blinds, the traditional sign to show that the family is in mourning, has been likened to the drawing of a sheet to cover the dead. Through various literary techniques, Wilfred Owen enhances the meaning of the poem.
How does Mental Cases Provide Insights into War? Wilfred Owen’s poetry explores the barbaric and inhumane nature of war. In Mental Cases Owen juxtaposes the emotional and physical state of these soldiers with the image of inhumane creatures. Owen's uses imagery, personification and juxtaposition to express the horrors that these soldiers continue to endure after the war. Mental Cases illustrate the disconnection many soldiers face in society.
World War I Poets: Owens and Brooke World War I was a very emotional time across the world. This emotion caused by the war sparked many poets interest. Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke were two of these poets that took their emotions caused by the war and expressed it through poetry. Wilfred Owen had longed to be a poet since age nineteen and succeeded in writing poems, but it was his poems that he wrote during the war that he became known for (Wilfred Owen). While fighting Owen met Siegfried Sassoon who inspired him to write war poetry to tell the truth about soldiers lives and the awful things that they go through while on the front (Wilfred Owen).
Isabelle Moran English Speech Wilfred Owen “Texts have the power to shape our perception of the world” This statement is demonstrated in Wilfred Owens poem’s Mental Case and Disabled. Through these poems’ Owen exposes and explores the reality of war by using his own terrifying experiences on the battle field to influence individuals perspectives on war. Owen’s poem mental case, a powerful poem, captures the damage to mens’ minds due to war. Owen utilises language and form to shock and describe in detail the appalling physical symptoms of mental torment. Through the title Owen displays men that were in their prime turn into wrecks.
I think this is further emphasised when Thomas describes them as ‘Fair-haired and ruddy’ giving the reader an image of youth that is forgotten ‘since their beauty passed’ indicating that Thomas is certain the soldiers will die. Moreover Thomas speaks of the ‘hounds’ in the past tense indicating a memory which he is haunted by, denoting that he thinks memories of the war will haunt him in the same way. These concerns of war are echoed throughout the poem which demonstrates that Thomas is very much aware of the amount of soldiers who have now gone and also of the unending war. The endlessness of the war is recognized when he chooses to say that the ‘hounds’ which is a metaphor for the soldiers ‘streamed by’ as stream is a constant action, Thomas is highlighting how constant the rate the men are leaving at is; but continuing to describe them as ‘a great dragon’ suggests that the men do not know their own power and are a danger to themselves due to their innocence which was mentioned previously. The choice of the word ‘stream’ also links
Question: Outline the important ideas in Owen and Sassoon's poetry and how those ideas are conveyed to the responder. In your response make detailed reference to at least two of the poems set for study. Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, both famous war poets of their time and today have recounted the reality and the aftermaths of war through the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. Owen and Sassoon, one an officer and the other a soldier of World War I has expressed, protested and revealed the untold reality of war. Their use of poetic techniques such as free verse and solid imagery has helped society in understanding the harsh veracity of conflicts, as well as the mood and opinions of the men caught up in the war.
It is a poem that conveys a message about the brutalities and horrors of war to an ill-informed and complacent audience in England. The length of the poem is short, but powerful and wrought with vivid imagery, griping the reader’s attention from the beginning to the end. The poem focuses on the horrifying death of a solder in WWI who falls victim to gas warfare because he fails to attach his gas mask quick enough. Wilfred Owens, a war veteran himself, uses the story of the soldier to expose the harsh truths of war. With his effective use of imagery, diction and irony, Wellford Owens strips away the glory of war and reveals the horror of what it was really like to fight in WWI.
The title of the poem, Dulce Et Decorum Est is a contradiction of what the poem is about. Owen displays war as not sweet, but brutal and hard hitting. I will portray how this poem deals with issues of war by focusing on the structure, imagery, word choice and the poems message in this poem. The poem consist of four stanzas and is about how badly represented the soldiers are fighting to keep Britain safe. The poem starts with what the soldiers actually look like.