The Ugliness of War in Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum est
Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum est" is seen as a strong expression of the ugliness of war, and "an attack on the idea of war being glorious" (Kerr 48). It transmits an irritating clip, with full animation and in vivid colors, of embittered and battered soldiers marching to their death. It also, cogently presents a nightmarish vision of hell uploading all its demons into the root directory of an impoverished soldier who saw one of his comrades gassed to death.
The images that Owen confected with the skill of a professional craftsman remain grafted in the reader's memory long after the poem is read, echoing its sober message times and times again. The soldier's voice bitterly imploring that patriarchy stop disseminating lies about the glory and sweetness of death in defense of ones country haunts the text. The poem presents this extremely tense experience articulately in 28 lines of well-confected verse. It is this confected eloquence and the well structured articulation of this highly disturbing experience that really betrays the poem's lack of immediacy and artificiality, and makes the poet an accomplice with those he attacks as disseminators of lies. Scrutinizing Owen's poem under the magnifying lens of Longinus' treatise On the Sublime, and Harold Pinter's view on discourse reveals that the poem perches on a detrimental fault line that destabilizes its mainstream readings.
While Owen challenges patriarchy and insinuates at its responsibilities for the horror of the war, he himself maintains, to a great extent, a conventional approach to writing poetry that does not subvert the traditional patriarchal forms of versification. The diction of the poem is delibe...
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...arizes them to him to the extent that they cease to become that terrible after several repeated readings. In fact, in Owen's poem the war is exhausted by its discourse the way, to borrow Jean Baudrillard's expression, "the eyes are exhausted in the gaze and the face is exhausted in the makeup." (76)
Works Cited
Baudrillard, Jean. Seduction. Trans. Brian Singer. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990.
Dorsch, T. S. Classical Literary Criticism. London: Penguin books, 1965.
Kerr, Douglas. Wilfred Owen's Voices: Language and Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
Owen, Wilfred. Wilfred Owen: Collected Letters. Ed. Harold Owen and John Bell. London: Oxford UP, 1967.
-----. Wilfred Owen: The Complete Poems and Fragments. Ed. John Stallworthy. 2 vols. New York: Norton, 1984.
Hollis, J. R. Harold Pinter: The Poetics of Silence. New York: Macmillan, 1970.
Similarly, Wilfred Owen’s poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” describes a soldier who witnesses the death of his comrade from poisonous gas. Using imagery and irony, Owen presents a blunt contrast between the propaganda practiced for recruitment and the truth behind the suffering endured by the soldiers. While presented in different formats, both literary works criticize the romanticism of war, arguing that there is no glory in the suffering and killing caused by conflict.
Owen, Wilfred. “Dulce Et Decorum Est.” World War I British Poets. Ed. Candace Ward. Dover Publications, Inc; New York, 1997.
Owen, Wilfred. "Dulce et Decorum Est." The Faber Book of War Poetry. Ed. Kenneth Baker. London: Faber, 1997. 3-4.
To draw into the poet’s world, the poet must draw relations between them, including the reader, making them feel what the poet feels, thinking what the poet thinks. Wilfred Owen does this very creatively and very effectively, in both of his poems, Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori and Anthem of Doomed Youth, who is seen as an idol to many people today, as a great war poet, who expresses his ideas that makes the reader feel involved in the moment, feeling everything that he does. His poems describe the horror of war, and the consequences of it, which is not beneficial for either side. He feels sorrow and anger towards the war and its victims, making the reader also feel the same.
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.
Wilfred Owen is a tired soldier on the front line during World War I. In the first stanza of Dulce Et Decorum Est he describes the men and the condition they are in and through his language shows that the soldiers deplore the conditions. Owen then moves on to tell us how even in their weak human state the soldiers march on, until the enemy fire gas shells at them. This sudden situation causes the soldiers to hurriedly put their gas masks on, but one soldier did not put it on in time. Owen tells us the condition the soldier is in, and how, even in the time to come he could not forget the images that it left him with. In the last stanza he tells the readers that if we had seen what he had seen then we would never encourage the next generation to fight in a war.
Owen's poems the irony between the truth of what happens at war and the lie that was
Owen as a young soldier held the same romantic view on war as majority of the other naive soldiers who thought that war would be an exciting adventure. The documentary extract illustrates how markedly Owen’s perspective of the war changed, as noted in a letter to his mother while he was still in the front lines: “But extra for me, there is the universal perversion of ugliness, the distortion of the dead ... that is what saps the soldierly spirit.” In ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’, Owen’s change of heart is evident through the irony of the poem title and the ending line “The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est, Pro patria mori.”, an allusion to the Roman axiom made famous by Horace, which translates to “The old Lie; It is sweet and right to die for your country.”. The line depicts Owen’s realisation that the horrific nature of war through human conflict is not sweet and right at all, rather, it is appalling and “bitter as the cud” as death is always present on the battlefield. Additionally, Owen indirectly responds to Jessie Pope’s poetry, a pro-war poetess, through the reference “My friend, you would not tell with such high zest… The old lie…”, further highlighting his changed perspective towards the war which has been influenced
Human conflict is a violent confrontation between groups of people due to differences in values and beliefs. During World War I, poet and soldier, Wilfred Owen, faced the harsh realities of human conflict, dying at a young age of 25, only six days before the war ended. Owen’s personal encounters during war had a profound influence on his life as reflected in the poems and letters he wrote before his passing. In using a variety of poetic devices to write about the suffering and brutality of war, vividly captured in his poems ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ and ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, Owen effectively conveys his own perspective about human conflict. ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ depicts the horrific scenes on the battlefield and a grotesque death from drowning
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.
War brings with it countless tragedies. Many of these tragedies only a veteran could fully understand. All too often the ugliness of war is glorified, and even worse, glamorized. In the poem Dulce et Decorum Est, by Wilfred Owen, the glorification of war is sarcastically refuted. Owen’s anger is eminent, as he graphically describes war in terms only a veteran or embattled soldier could comprehend.
How Wilfred Owen Uses Language and Imagery in His Poetry to Communicate his Attitudes of War
Owen, Wilfred. “Disabled.” World War One British Poets. Ed. Candace Ward. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1997. 23-24.
The Wilfred Owen Multimedia Digital Archive. http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/jtap/images/mss/bl/ms43720/20f4a.jpg Ellmann, Richard and O'Clair, Robert, eds. The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, Second Edition.
Wilfred Owen was a British poet during the time of the First World War and even fought as a leader of the Second Manchester's against the French in the battle of Joncourt. While in recovery from a Trench Mortar explosion, Owen switched his style of writing poetry to the horrors and brutality of World War I. As seen in “Dulce Et Decorum Est”, Owen describes the true nature of the War and how fighting for days at a time wears down troops and can turn innocent men into remorseless savages while in possession of some mortars and most importantly, the notorious gas grenade. Throughout the poem, Owen describes a realistic daily scene of the battlefield through detailed descriptions on the grotesque and inhumane ways man can sin his way through war