A Look into the Poetry of the Great War

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Recommended: Horror of the war in the poetry of wilfred owen

The famous works written in 1917 by poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon cast aside the conventional inspiration for content, patriotism, and delve into the horrific journey that is war. Two poems in particular, Sassoon’s “Suicide in the Trenches” and Owen’s “Dulce Et Decorum Est”, speak boldly against life in the trenches in efforts of evading the lies and illusions of a clean and righteous war. In doing so, readers are presented with tales that conjure up powerful and far-from-picturesque images that harbor the ability to shake the very core of a human through impactful language as crafted by these poets. While both poems allow the reader to come to the same conclusion that war is not clean, their approaches differ and therefore create a difference in weight of impact. Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce Et Decorum Est” is more impactful in that the gruesome imagery is more explicitly defined through dark, evoking diction, and the message of the poem is satirically approached through the strategic title to target a specific audience, while Siegfried Sassoon’s “Suicide in the Trenches” offers a similar message, but is presented in a fashion that relies on heavy contrast of tone to convey the resentful message.
“Dulce Et Decorum Est” is made up of grotesque diction scattered all across the poem to illustrate the conditions in which soldiers try to retain their humanities both physical and psychological, whereas “Suicide in the Trenches” offers little description of the horrendous physical aspects of war. Right from the get-go, Owen jumps into the brutality of war as he recalls, “Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,” (Owen). His use of words like beggars, knock-kneed, and ha...

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... before even beginning the poem, we are presented with half the truth, also regarded as a lie, similar to how the speaker was drawn into the war, through a lie. “Suicide in the Trenches” is blunt and lacks the art that Owen has orchestrated with his title. Sassoon’s title while it explains the poem in few words, does not give the reader something to look forward to with its rather melancholy introduction. The irony of Owen’s title and the journey he takes us on to reach the end of his poem where the reader comes to a conclusion about the title is the feature of his poem making it stand out as compared to the poetry of his contemporaries.
“Suicide in the Trenches” has a sharp and sudden shift in tone between stanza one and two where “Dulce Et Decorum Est” gradually augments the darkness of its tone by stanza causing each poem to send a different message.

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