Wilfred Owen's Dulce Et Decorum Est

A soldier named Wilfred Owen wrote a beautiful, yet horrifying and gruesome, poem about the realities of war. Dulce et Decorum Est vividly describes the death of another unnamed soldier. The man’s drowning in a thick green gas is depicted so realistically it is hard for the reader to forget, which was exactly his intention. Though he died in 1918 and the poem didn’t surface until 1920, he wanted the general public to see and feel the harsh realities of fighting for one’s country. He named the poem after Horace’s Ode 13. “Dulce et Decorum Est,” meaning “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country,” is used ironically. He quotes Horace in the last lines of the poem prefacing the statement with “The old Lie.” He wanted readers to share the feeling of pain and grief that he and other soldiers did.

A movement called Dada, which had no meaning other than being a signifier of negation. Members of this movement related the terms lack of meaning to the seemingly meaningless life they now led in the face of war. Artists included in this movement openly opposed war, and protested the social

Often times, artists would name their works using words or phrases that had no correlation to the painting or to each other. They did this just to show their non-conformist attitudes, and viewers took it as anti-art. It was not anti-art, but simply a way of showing their version of non-traditional creativity. Flower Hammer was a relief wall piece, so something between sculpture and painting. The pieces were put together and created by chance. He drew random shapes and doodles on paper and then sent the drawings to a carpenter who would then cut them into wood. The individual pieces were randomly painted and then randomly put on top of another before being secured into place. This work and similar ones intentionally go against all artist’s aesthetic senses, which is the reason why many thought of them as anti-art