Paradox Of War In Wilfred Owen's Poetry

Much of Wilfred Owen’s poetry in the collection World War One British Poets is of a morbid nature, emphasizing the terrible reality of war, the death, the destruction, the ruined lives that are its aftermath. The poem Apologia Pro Poemate Meo represents a unique expression of the fundamental paradox of man’s experience of warfare. This essay will address the dichotomy of the awful and glorious aspects of war in the poems of Wilfred Owen. There is a stark contrast between Apologia Pro Poemate Meo and the other poems Owen wrote about The Great War. Owen does not shy away from the terrible nature of battle in this poem when he refers to “the sorrowful dark of hell,/ Whose world is but the trembling of a flare/ And heaven but as the highway for

(Homer, 16.478-89) Homer’s description of the cowering fear of soon to be defeated enemy with the exultation of the victor calls to mind Owen’s second stanza;
Merry it was to laugh there¬-
Where death becomes absurd and life absurder.
For power was on us as we slashed bones bare
Not to feel sickness or remorse of murder. (Owen, 5-8)

There is no remorse for the heroes of Homer or Owen’s poems, at least not in the thick of battle. At the same time the use of words such as ‘murder’ or the comparison to the defeated to a fish gaping on a hook leaves no room for glorification. Emphasis of the loss of dignity for the fallen serves to highlight the contrast between the elation of the victorious and the despair of the defeated.
Understanding of this dichotomy seems to be restricted to combatants, as Owen implies in his final stanzas;
Nevertheless, except you share
With them in hell the sorrowful dark of hell,
Whose world is but the trembling of a flare
And heaven but as the highway for a shell

You shall not hear their mirth:
You shall not think them well content (Owen,

The advent of industrial scale shelling, machine gun fire and gas attacks meant that many died as Homer’s Trojan Thestor; “cowering crouched in his fine polished chariot,/ crazed with fear” (16.478-77) without having experienced Patroclus’ triumph. In Apologia Pro Poemate Meo Wilfred Owen is describing his experience of battle in its fullness, not as simply the horror of terror and death in the trenches, but in the exultation of a successful attack, of “spirit surging light and clear/ Past the entanglement where hopes lay strewn” (Owen, 11-12). His poem stands out from a great deal of the literature of warfare in its depth of understanding and expression about this, the ultimate paradox of warfare: that the worst mankind can do sets the stage his greatest