Wilfred Owen as a war poet Dulce et decorum Est

1. WILFRED OWEN AS A WAR
POET
Presented By : Janvi Nakum

2. Paper No : 110 (A) History Of English
Name : Janvi Nakum
Roll No : 11
Topic : Wilfred Owen : As a war Poet
M.A. Sem : 2
Presentation: 5
Email id : janvinakum360@gmail.com
Enrollment : 4069206420210020

4. WILFRED OWEN
• Wilfred Edward Salter Owen, the eldest of four children, was born in Oswestry,
Shropshire, where his father was working as a railway clerk. The family soon had to
move to Birkenhead, and Wilfred was educated at the independent Birkenhead
Institute until 1907.
• when his father was appointed to a senior post in Shrewsbury. Wilfred took a four-
year, free course as a pupil-teacher at the Shrewsbury Technical School, gaining not
only a good grounding in French, English literature, the earth sciences and other
subjects but also experience of teaching children from very poor homes.
• Studying Wordsworth and Keats made him long to be a poet, and he started writing
verse. He qualified as an elementary school teacher, but career prospects were poor,
so he decided to try for a London University external degree, passing the first stage,
matriculation, in 1911.

5. In January 1917 Owen arrived on the Western Front, at the northern end of the
Somme sector. Most of his later poems are based on his experiences during the next
four months. Conditions were appalling: bitter cold, incessant rain, deep mud,
obliterated trenches, constant shelling. ‘His first, worst ordeal is described in his vivid
letters and in his later poem, ‘The Sentry’. The weather turned to intense frost
(‘Exposure’, ‘Futility’). Eventually, after being blown into the air by a shell while asleep
and coming to among the scattered remains of another officer, he was sent to a
shellshock centre (‘Mental Cases’) and then, in June, to Craiglockhart War Hospital,
near Edinburgh.

6. OWEN’S POETRY
• Pain and theatricality are often the twin components in Owen's poetry. In many of
the poems, the opening line - often even the opening words - propel the body into
action: ‘Move him into the sun’, ‘Cramped in that funnelled hole’, ‘So Abram rose,
and clave the wood, and went’, ‘He dropped, - more sullenly than wearily’, ‘Sit on the
bed. I’m blind, and three parts shell’ ‘Halted against the shade of a last hill’.
Similarly, in 'Dulce', the body is already there, entering the poetic canvas in medias.
• Some of his 1918 poems ‘Insensibility’, ‘Strange Meeting’, ‘Spring Offensive’ and
others – are among the greatest poems about war in the language.

7. DULCE ET DECORUM EST
• One of the most famous of all war poems and
probably the best-known of all of Wilfred
Owen’s poems, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ was
written in response to the jingoistic pro-war
verses being written by people like Jessie Pope.
Indeed, Pope is the ‘friend’ whom Owen
addresses directly in the closing lines of the
poem. It remains Owen’s best-known poem and
perhaps his greatest statement about the war.

8. TITLE OF THE POEM
• ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ is a poem by the British poet Wilfred Owen, drafted at
Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh in 1917. Owen had been admitted to the
hospital after suffering from shell shock after a period of fighting in the Battle of the
Somme.
• At the hospital, he met the older poet Siegfried Sassoon, who had just published his
book The Old Huntsman (1917); his direct, unflinching style allowed Owen to bring
similar characteristics into his own work.
• The title is taken from a Latin tag, repeated in full on the last line. Taken from the poet
Horace, it means ‘it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country’; a sentiment which
Owen’s experience had proven to be an ‘old lie’, and which the poem works to dispel
through vivid descriptions of the realities of trench warfare.

9. • Dulce Et Decorum Est' is possibly the most famous 'war poem' which, since the First
World War, has come to mean 'anti-war' poetry: the image of a young man
coughing up his lungs remains the classic example of 'war realism' in its full-frontal
shock value. Yet, to read the text as 'history', as a transcript of trench-horrors, is to
ignore its singularity as poetry. Neither the transparent envelope of trench
experience nor just language whispering to itself about itself, 'Dulce Et Decorum Est'
is one of those primal moments in the history of not just English but world poetry
when lyric form bears most fully the trauma of modern industrial warfare.

10. • In sharp contrast, in 'Dulce Et Decorum Est', he sets the war-ravaged body and mind against the
abstract rhetoric of honour and sacrifice. In the process, he plays three separate experiences – a
night march, a gas attack and traumatic neurosis – along an almost single vertical bodily axis as
he traces the very pulse of pain as it moves from exposed feet in the first stanza to exposed
nerves in the final one. Time is held in suspense as one nightmarish experience follows, and
blurs into, another until the final part of the poem is literally about a nightmare: the repetitive
rhythm of the march gives way to the traumatic compulsion to repeat.
• At first glance, the poem may seem to bear out the theme of 'passive suffering' which led W B
Yeats to object to war poetry and attack Owen in particular When Yeats witheringly notes that
'somebody has put his worst & most famous poem in a glass-case in the British Museum', the
object of disdain may well have been the manuscript of 'Dulce'! But any simple notion of
'passivity' that he reductively levels at Owen is countered in the poem not by the 'tragic joy' that
Yeats privileged but by an altogether new kind of aesthetic and empathy.

11. WORKS CITED
• Das, Santanu, et al. “A close reading of 'Dulce Et Decorum Est.'” The British Library, 25 May
2016, https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/a-close-reading-of-dulce-et-
decorum-est. Accessed 15 April 2022.
• Stallworthy, Jon, and Dominic Hibberd. “Wilfred Owen (1893 – 1918) – The War Poets
Association.” The War Poets Association,
https://warpoets.org/conflicts/great-war/wilfred-owen-1893-1918/
Accessed 15 April 2022.
• Owen, Wilfred. “'Dulce et Decorum Est.'” The British Library, https://www.bl.uk/works/dulce-
et-decorum-est. Accessed 15 April 2022.