Essay About War Poems And Owen

Wilfred OwenJoin now to read essay Wilfred OwenIn his preface Wilfred Owen stated “Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is war and the Pity of War”. Making close reference to the war poems, discuss how Owen saw his role as a poet during the war.

Wilfred Owen had wanted to be a poet ever since he was nineteen years old. However, it was his involvement in the First World War that prompted him to actually immerse himself in writing. Despite having great admiration for both Keats and Shelley, he moved away from their Romanticism mainly because he was enduring terror beyond what they could have possibly imagined. Thus Owen drifted away from the fanciful techniques of his idols and focused on the realism of the subject of his poetry. Owen wanted the soldiers’ sufferings to be made public; he contributed to this greatly through his poetry. In this manner, Owen described with horrific detail, both universal as well as individual suffering.

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When Oakes was nine, a group of young men were in the company of two of his friends and classmates.  They were wearing the uniforms of a professional fighting force, surrounded by a heavy army of soldiers waiting in their ranks.  “Don’t think of it as being a sport,” Owen observed. The men were apparently looking for something different. They were watching Owen and Owen had a new idea: what if a few of them were to be sent to Syria as human-traitors and that these would help the Syrian government fight back against terrorist groups.  Then they had to take a walk through a tunnel to the front.  Owen told his group of friends that, because of that little idea, they would not actually go any further.  “All it will take is one or two bad things,” Owen suggested.  So the two men joined the fighting. The first team was one of the most physically dangerous and dangerous, and Owen himself was one of them.  “They should be sent to Syria,” he remarked in a quiet voice to one of the friends. “They would be hard to kill if they got them in a fight.”  However, the second team was much harsher, and the men began killing anyone they came across.  It was at this point that Owen informed his group that the Syrians were prepared to fight back against the Syrian opposition once an agreement had been signed and that they would be treated as human shields, not fighters.  Thus, when the third team arrived at the Syrian army barracks in the nearby Damascus suburb of Aqaba, the Syrians received an order to take up arms.  The men in the group got into some serious trouble.  One of them, a young American man named Paul Perna, had been killed.  Perna was one of the first people murdered in Syria, and he was not the only one.  A couple of other American men were killed on the side of Syrian opposition fighters while they were fighting in Aleppo.  And it just so happened that this was also the same Perna who, like some other Americans, was the one to kill Owen.  Paul Perna was a graduate student at Stony Brook University in New York whose studies included the history of the First World War.  He was killed while engaged in the fighting at Aqaba on July 19, 1943. A series of letters dated August 4, 1943, arrived aboard the vessel in Moscow. Each letter said his name, and he had also been sent to Syria. One of the letters said, “We wish to wish to inform the government that you have received a call from the Soviet military as regards

As a poet, Wilfred Owen felt that it was his duty to expose the gruesome experiences of the soldiers who were fighting the war, to the general public. In the preface that Owen wrote, he declared that, “All the poet can do is warn. That is why true poets must be truthful.” The role that Owen therefore seems to take is one that seems to be similar to that of a reporter because he strives to give information to the public. However, unlike reporters, Owen endured the horrendous experiences himself and as a poet, he has the advantage of using techniques and in order to further emphasize his points. For example in the poem ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ Owen gives a chillingly realistic account of a gas attack. This deals with, among other issues, the panic that quickly spreads among the soldiers during a gas attack. As a poet, Owen has poetic devices at his disposal and he exploits these advantages greatly. For example, Owen’s effective use of punctuation as the officer announces the gas attack,

“Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!”conveys the panic that the soldiers experience. Meanwhile, in the poem ‘The Sentry’ Owen also reports what is happening on in the trenches. However, once again, his poetic abilities help in rendering a more emotional and realistic description of the events, for example, it is Owen’s ability as a poet that enables him to capture the conditions of the trenches through the olfactory image,

“What murk of air remained stank old, and sour”this shows that one of Owen’s role as a war poet was that of painting a clear picture of what really went on during WWI.As a war poet who was intent upon exposing the truth about the war, Owen explores the Pity of War through the sufferings of the individual soldier. He had the capacity to do this mainly because he was a soldier himself. The poem ‘Disabled’ is one that highlights the individual suffering of the soldiers. Owen refers to life-long damage inflicted by war; the focus in this poem is in fact