Wilfred Owen's War Poetry

1. Introduction

Trudging through ravaged landscapes with rooted out trees, blood and mud everywhere, trenches infested with rats, half filled with water and with corpses – these were the circumstances in which some 8,700,000 lives had been lost during the First World War. However, this reality was long kept from the knowledge of the civilians at home, who continued to write about the noble pursuit of heroic ideals in old patriotic slogans (Anthology 2012: 2017). Those poets who were involved on the front soon realized the full horror of war, which is reflected in their poetic techniques, diction, and imaginations. Campbell (1999: 204) refers to their poetry as trench lyric, which not only calls attention to the poems’ most common setting, but also the accompanying images of filth, barbed wire, shell fire, and so forth. The genre portrays these distressing conditions in an unromantic light, thus differentiating it from the patriotic lyrics of the early war. It is realistic in that it employs the traditional styles and diction of English poetry, however uses these conventional poetic forms to portray the gruesome details of the situations of the trench (Campbell 1999: 205).

One of those poets was Wilfred Owen, whose later work has become canonized as a representative of trench lyric. He is the poet who wrote with most pathos, who started out as a follower of Keats and Shelley but toughened and tightened his language under the pressure of traumatic frontline experiences and who came to see it as his poetic task to warn of the horrors of war (Buelens & Claes 2013: 115). In this essay, I will discuss how Owen’s use of a variety or pervasive poetical techniques reinforces the bleak atmosphere of his poems, and how his poetry evolve...

... middle of paper ...

...: More Recent Period.” English

Literature II. Historical Survey: More Recent Period. 2013. 113-115. Print.

Ramazani and Stallworthy. "Voices from World War I" The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Gen.

ed. Stephen Greenblatt. 9th ed. Vol. F. New York: Norton, 2012. 2016-2018. Print.

Ramazani and Stallworthy. "Siegfried Sassoon" The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Gen. ed.

Stephen Greenblatt. 9th ed. Vol. F. New York: Norton, 2012. 2023.Print.

Ramazani and Stallworthy. "Wilfred Owen" The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Gen. ed. Stephen

Greenblatt. 9th ed. Vol. F. New York: Norton, 2012. 2034. Print.

Campbell, James et al. “Combat Gnosticism : The Ideology of First World War Poetry Criticism.” 30.1

(2014): 203–215. Print.

Kerr, Douglas. “Wilfred Owen and the Social Question.” 34.2 (2014): 183–195. Print.