Wilfred Owen

## Biography

**Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)** was the greatest of the war poets. He was born at Oswestry and educated at Birkenhead and London University, and, after spending some time as a tutor in France, he served as an infantry officer from 1915 until his death. He was awarded the Military
Cross.
As early as 1910 Owen was writing verse in the romantic tradition of Keats and Tennyson, and the influence of French poetry, the product of his stay in France, was never completely shaken off. But the work by which he lives was all produced after his **meeting in 1917 with Sassoon.**

## Historical & Cultural Context

### World War I

The horrors of the First World War marked the end of a phase of Western European liberal culture. In four years from 1914 to 1918, over nine million lives were lost from Europe, the British Commonwealth, and the USA. Deep psychological wounds were caused in the minds of the survivors and a physical and metaphysical wasteland was created across Europe. At the beginning of the First World War the characteristic response to it was that to serve in the war was a matter of duty. Poetry was written in order to express a sense of honour and to celebrate the glories of war. The reaction of poets such as Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, and Ivor Gurney was to write vivid and realistic poetry satirising the vainglory and incompetence of many in the officer class whose actions caused the unnecessary deaths of some of the finest young men. In poems such as They and The General, Sassoon was one of the first poets to point to the consequences of war for the maimed and disfigured soldiers who had to live with the horrors long after the war had finished. The language of Sassoon’s poetry is deliberately anti-Romantic in its rejection of conventional poetic diction in favour of sharp and biting colloquialisms.

### War Poets

The First World War brought to public notice many poets, particularly among the young men in the armed forces, while it provided a new source of inspiration for writers of established reputation. Not a few of the younger poets were killed or died in the struggle, and it is impossible to estimate the loss sustained by English poetry in their deaths.
There can be no clearer reflection of the changing national attitude toward the conflict as the weary years brought disillusionment than that found in the poetry of these men. Broadly two phases may be distinguished. The first was one of patriotic fervour, almost of rejoicing in the opportunity of self-sacrifice in the cause of human freedom, and a revival of the romantic conception of the knight-at-arms. Many writers, indeed, lived and served throughout the War and preserved unblemished this fervour of the early years. But, as the carnage grew more appalling and the end seemed as distant as ever, other poets arose with the declared intention of shattering this illusion of the splendour of war by a frankly realistic picture of the suffering, brutality, squalor, and futility of the struggle.
**Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)** First-hand knowledge of the conditions of trench warfare produced in him a bitter disillusionment, a brief period as a conscientious objector, and, above all, a determination to shock the people at home into a realization of the ghastly truth. With a studied bluntness and often a provocative coarseness of language, Sassoon painted the horrors of life and death in the trenches, dug-outs, and hospitals, and a merciless and calculated realism gave to his work a vitality not previously found in our war poetry. **To his credit will always remain the fact that his was the work to inspire the greatest of all the war poets, Wilfred Owen.**

### Literary Style

His experience of the trenches had brought him rapidly to maturity, and Sassoon set his feet on the path which he himself had already taken. With a frank realism, free from the violent bitterness of so much of Sassoon's poetry, **Owen set out to present the whole reality of war--the boredom, the hopelessness, the futility, the horror, occasionally the courage and self-sacrifice, but, above all, the pity of it.** He himself wrote:

***"I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."***

And never has the pity of war been more deeply felt or more powerfully shown. Though his satire is often sharp, he never loses his artistic poise, and his most bitter work has a dignity which is truly great. A gifted artist with a fine feeling for words and a subtle rhythmic sense, Owen was a ceaseless experimenter in verse techniques. Probably the most influential part of his technique was the para-rhyme, which was so enthusiastically adopted by later poets. Indeed, Owen's influence on these writers was very great in spite of the slimness of the
volume of **his poems, which were collected and published by Siegfried Sassoon in 1920.**

The poetry Owen models relocates its centres of imaginative attention to a level of elementary, apparently unprepossessed feeling, where the bleaker truths of the human condition, seen as suffering in the image of war, are newly expressed.

## Dulce et Decorum est. (1917)

One of his most bitterly **ironic** poems, **Dulce et decorum est**, describes the horrors of a **gas attack** while commenting ironically on the **limits of patriotism**. (The complete title to the poem – from a Latin epigraph – translates into the phrase **‘It is sweet and honourable to die for one’s country’**.) Owen came to see it instead as a duty to **warn of the horrors of war** and to ask why political rulers allowed such mass destruction to continue for so long. He also **questioned the necessity of war**, stressed the common humanity of both sides in war, and linked the futility of the deaths of individual soldiers to the cosmic indifference of a world from which God was conspicuously absent.

Wilfred Owen testifies to the meaning of his own combat experience in a lyric realism of fiercely detailed immediacy. While this appreciation is featured routinely – and rightly – in literary histories, the achievement of his mature poetry also shows a special, steady intensity of address to the public, political constructions of the war. This imperative accounts for one of the stronger rhetorical personalities in the major work of the last year of the war. Here he assumes the role of reporter, who orients his witnessing force to the standard, presumptive misunderstandings, of which he will disabuse his readership. In ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, for instance, the narrative account of a gas attack modulates into a direct address to the audience – the ‘you’ Owen accuses in his rhetorically forceful, masterfully contoured, finale. The double periodic construction of subordinate clauses suspends the arrival of the main clause and then intensifies its impact, its dominance in the grammatical structure, when it comes. The speaker thus rather overwhelms the level familiarity Owen assigns his reader, as ‘My friend’. This personage retains some memory of Jessie Pope, whom Owen named in a mock-dedication to an earlier draft of the poem. She had gained her fame from the noisily jingoistic poetry she published so widely.

Poem:

Dulce et Decorum est.

1. Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

2. **Kn**ock-**kn**eed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

3. Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

4. And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

5. **M**en **m**arched asleep. **M**any had lost their boots,

6. But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;

7. **D**runk with fatigue; **d**eaf even to the hoots

8. Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

9. Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling

10. Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

11. But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

12. And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime. —

13. Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

14. As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

15. In all my dreams before my helpless sight

16. He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

17. If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

18. Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

19. And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

20. His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin,

21. If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

22. Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

23. Bitter as the cud

24. Of vile, ***i***ncurable sores on ***i***nnocent tongues, —

25. My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

26. To children ardent for some desperate glory,

27. The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

28. *Pro patria mori.*

Rhyming Pattern: ABABCDCD EFEFGE GE HIHIJKJKLMLM

Meter: Iambic pentameter

## Intro Paragraph

Starting in 1914, World War I was the first modern war fought in Europe. New technological developments in warfare, including armed airplanes and the invention of the tank, contributed to extensive destruction and a number of casualties never seen before the 20th century. In light of this dreadful event, a group of soldiers who came to be known as the War Poets, sought to express their points of view and experiences through poetry. Among them was Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), an English soldier who contradicted the romantic image of war perpetuated by propaganda. In his 1917 poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” (DDE from now onwards), Owen recounts a soldier’s nightmare where the latter witnesses the death of a brother in arms. With gruesome imagery and poignant irony, Owen paints a perfect picture of the horrors he and others lived on the battlefield.

### MLA citation

Owen, Wilfred. “Dulce et Decorum est.” *Poems by Wilfred Owen*, Pennsylvania State University, 2007, pp. 24

## Sources

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Albert, E. *History of English Literature*
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Carter, R. *The Routledge History of Literature*
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Marcus, L, Nicholls, P. *The Cambridge History of Twentieth-century English Literature*
4. ↑  Owen, Wilfred. “Dulce et Decorum est.” *Poems by Wilfred Owen*, Pennsylvania State University, 2007, pp. 24