A Comparison of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon's War Poetry
Lieutenant Wilfred Edward Salter Owen M.C. of the second Battalion
Manchester Regiment, was born March 18th 1893 in Oswestry, Shropshire.
He was educated at the Birkenhead Institute and at Shrewsbury
Technical school. Wilfred Owen was the eldest of four children and the
son of a railway official. He was of welsh ancestry and was
particularly close to his mother whose evangelical Christianity
greatly influenced his poetry. Owen was in the Pyrenees at the time
when war broke out he was tutoring to the Leger family. He became
frustrated hearing about all the men dying in the battlefields of
Belgium and France and wanted to make a difference so he went back to
England where he signed up for the army in late September 1915. He was
trained in Essex and was sent out to Etaples in France on 30th
December 1916. He got his first taste of battle twelve days later in
the bitterly cold weather of January. Owen took part in numerous
battles between then and 2nd May when he was taken seriously ill and
was eventually sent back to England on 16th June 1917 where he was
told he was out of action for six months. It was here that he first
met Siegfried Sassoon. Siegfried encouraged Owen to write about his
war experiences and so he started to do this in the form of his
poetry. He started to write poems and send them with his letters to
his mother some of his first were: Anthem for Doomed Youth and Dulce
Et Decorum Est. In March 1918 Owen went back on active duty and was
transferred to the front line and during the attack on the Fonsome
line he had to take control of the company because the ...
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...o war and going out to
fight. It was these people that Siegfried thought were prolonging the
war for longer than was necessary. In the 'Memorial Tablet' Sassoon
writes of how one particular boy or young man was pushed into going to
war by a 'squire' this boy or young man was killed by a shell 'and
then a shell Burst slick upon the duck-boards: so I fell'. At a
memorial service for the dead the squire who sits 'in his pew' and 'he
gives my gilded name a thoughtful stare', is thinking of what he has
done. It is his fault for pushing this boy or young man to go to war
and he is now dead. This was the sort of thing that Sassoon was trying
to get at in his writing. Trying to make people stop and think that
this war was being prolonged for longer than it needed to be and it
should be finished before more men needlessly died.
..." the speaker is telling his audience that the dead soldier was a young man. The tenderness of his age further amplifies the horrific nature of war.
...and wounds soldiers but murdering their spirits. War hurts families and ruins lives. Both stories showed how boys became in terrible situations dealing with war.
nobody realizes how bad the soldiers actually have so he is forced to lie. He says “No,
War deprives soldiers of so much that there is nothing more to take. No longer afraid, they give up inside waiting for the peace that will come with death. War not only takes adolescence, but plasters life with images of death and destruction. Seeger and Remarque demonstrate the theme of a lost generation of men in war through diction, repetition, and personification to relate to their readers that though inevitable and unpredictable, death is not something to be feared, but to calmly be accepted and perhaps anticipated. The men who fight in wars are cast out from society, due to a misunderstanding of the impact of such a dark experience in the formative years of a man’s life, thus being known as the lost generation.
are not free in service, you do what you are told and this is the same
The way the characters change emphasises the effect of war on the body and the mind. The things the boys have to do in the act of war and “the things men did or felt they had to do” 24 conflict with their morals burning the meaning of their morals with the duties they to carry out blindly. The war tears away the young’s innocence, “where a boy in a man 's body is forced to become an adult” before he is ready; with abrupt definiteness that no one could even comprehend and to fully recover from that is impossible. The story is riddled with death; all of the dead he’s has seen: Linda, Ted Lavender, Kiowa, Curt Lemon, the man he killed, and all the others without names.
How Wilfred Owen Uses Language and Imagery in His Poetry to Communicate his Attitudes of War
Comparing two war poems written by Wilfred Owen: Dulce et decorum Est. and Anthem for Doomed Youth. In this essay I will be comparing two war poems written by Wilfred Owen: ‘Dulce et decorum Est’ and ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’. By Comparing the two I will be able to distinguish the fact that Wilfred Owen is very anti-propaganda and that's why he feels so strongly about this. The two poems have many similarities but also a fair amount of differences, which I will be discussing in this essay.
The boy awakes from a night of being lost in the woods, a product of pushing the lines of his invisible enemy deep into their own territory and the fright of an unfamiliar animal. He arose to a sight that he is unable to comprehend; that what he is seeing could even be a creation of war. What the boy is confronted with is a horrific and stomach churning scene of “maimed and bleeding men” (Bierce 43) that “crept upon their hands and knees.” (43). Being confronted with the ghastly scene the boy’s ideals of war blind him to the reality of what he is witnessing. An idea that Bierce portrays that even with the sights of battle many men are blinded by their own machismo and idyllic of
This story brings back some harsh truths about warfare, and explains why so many naïve young men joined up, only to suffer deaths well before their time.
Considered the leading English poet of the First World War, Owen is remembered for realistic poems depicting the horrors of war, which were inspired by his experiences at the Western Front in 1916 and 1917. Owen considered the true subject of his poems to be "the pity of war," and attempted to present the true horror and realities of battle and its effects on the human spirit. His unique voice, which is less passionate and idealistic than those of other war poets, is complemented by his unusual and experimental style of writing. He is recognized as the first English poet to successfully use pararhyme, in which the rhyme is made through altered vowel sounds. Owen’s distinct way of both writing and reading poems led to influence other poets in the 1920s and 1930s.
World War one and two. Both these wars stole many young men’s lives from them. Stole sons from their mothers. Stole brothers from their sister but also stole many innocent lives in the process. An estimated 60 million lives lost and for what? For land, for power, wealth. War is brutal, gruesome, costly and pointless. What good could possibly come from a war? The truth is without these wars, the world of literature wouldn’t be the same. These wars bought rise to names such as Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, and Edward Thomas. Among all that death, destruction, and calamity; somehow great poets were born.
World War I impacted poetry profoundly. Poets who served in the war were using poetry to share their horrific stories about the hardships they faced. These poets became known as “war poets.” They wrote about the traumatic, life changing experiences that haunted them once the war was over. Intense poems started emerging that portrayed the mental and physical struggles soldiers faced. Two examples of the impact that World War I had on poetry is seen in the poems “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen and “Repression of War Experience” by Siegfried Sassoon.
Wilfred Owen’s poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” makes the reader acutely aware of the impact of war. The speaker’s experiences with war are vivid and terrible. Through the themes of the poem, his language choices, and contrasting the pleasant title preceding the disturbing content of the poem, he brings attention to his views on war while during the midst of one himself. Owen uses symbolism in form and language to illustrate the horrors the speaker and his comrades go through; and the way he describes the soldiers, as though they are distorted and damaged, parallels how the speaker’s mind is violated and haunted by war.
While Sassoon’s influence on Owen was very effective they still are greatly different from each other. Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon are two talented war poets who meet each other in a hospital near Edinburgh both suffering from shell shock. Shell shock is psychological disturbance caused by prolonged exposure to active warfare. Owen was a few years younger than Sassoon which made it look like Sassoon was a mentor to Owen. Sassoon had college education at Marlborough and Clare College but did not take a degree. Owen was not educated to the level that Sassoon was. Owen actually became increasingly critical of the Church’s role in society. Owen has a much clever way with his word choice. Sassoon on the other hand writes his