Wilfred Owen Research Paper

Wilfred Owen’s War Realism World War I’s powerful and long lasting impact affected people all over the world. A significant figure from the literature of World War I, Wilfred Owen, expressed his powerful thoughts on the war in his writing. Owen had experience in the war as a soldier himself which made him particularly noteworthy. He noted many hardships that included suffering from illnesses and the changing weather conditions. His firsthand accounts demonstrate the truth about war. In one of Wilfred Owen’s particular poems, “Dulce et Decorum Est”, he wrote with extensive imagery of the war which showed his view point as a soldier and what occurred in reality. The stanzas have a darkening mood as they go on to make the war seem very real and
2 Possibly both the biggest influence and one of Owen’s closest friendships developed with Siegfried Sassoon. They met in a hospital and bonded over their love of literature and having someone to share experiences with no matter how dark. Siegfried writes that others knew he had a particular influence over Owen, but he developed mostly as an individual writer. He notes that they have a similar style of war poetry and he most affected Owen by challenging him to write with “compelling realism” (“Meeting Wilfred Owen”). Wilfred and Siegfried developed a unique friendship where they saw the true value in their companion’s writing. In addition, Siegfried discussed how Owen developed into an overall intelligent man that helped him in his writing and that his character contained “absolute integrity of mind” (“Owen, Wilfred Poems”). Siegfried Sassoon praised Owen because he wrote with compelling honesty and integrity, making him stand out from other war poets at the time. In his specific work, “Dulce et Decorum Est”, Owen uses Sassoon’s influence about realism and expresses how things honestly occurred 2, “If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud of vile, incurable
3 The imagery provides important context for his writing and allows the reader to create a picture in their mind about what he experienced. Owen opens the poem with soldiers marching continuously without the ability to stop as they constantly fought for their lives and in fear of getting attacked. He provides the image of the soldiers suffering from loss of blood, fatigue, and deafness due to the strong and sudden explosions nearby. Owen portrays the powerful toll the war takes on the soldiers and it shows the negative viewpoint that he has from fighting as a soldier himself. A reporter commenting on the poem’s effect noted that it, 2 “Describes explicitly the horror of the gas attack and the death of a wounded man who has been flung into a wagon” and he further describes the war as a “walking nightmare” (“Dulce et Decorum Est”). The poem’s dynamic imagery allows the war to seem alive and overall very threatening to the soldiers risking their lives. Owen uses more imagery to display the horrors of the war throughout the poem, specifically in the second stanza. Wilfred Owen writes with a supernatural mood,2 “And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime… Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light, as under I green see, I saw him drowning” (Owen