Poems are something that lasts forever. The essence of the poems resonates at all times even it was written in the past. Poems are manifestation of the poet’s feelings and emotions and a form of self-expression and an outlet of thoughts and ideas. Poems play significant role in the society for through it we are able to get a glimpse of what the author see and know his interpretation about a certain thing.
Throughout the years, many poems are written by numerous poets and they were written under various topics and themes. One of the significant poets in the history is Wilfred Owen.He is perceived as one of the leading poets during the World War I and greatly known for his poetry in line with warfare and battles. His poems are very significant to the audiences of the various generations and his poems last even after his death.
Wilfred Owen Wilfred Owen’s real name is Wilfred Edward Salter Owen who was an English poets and a soldier and regarded as one of the leading poets of the World War I. He was born in a place called Plas Wilmot in March 18 in the year 1893. He was the eldest of the four children of Tom and Susan Owen (Lee). They lived in a house with their grandfather.But when his grandfather died in the year 1897, the whole family moved to the streets of Birkenhead. He received his education at the Birkenhead Institute and at Shrewsbury Technical School.
He realized that he is fond of poetry when he spent a holiday in Cheshire. Throughout his growing years, it was inculcated to him the teachings of the Anglican in the evangelical school. John Keats is one of the major influences of his writing and like most of the writers’ influence during the early years is the Bible (Stallworthy 18). He passed the exam in London University. His studies suffered when his uncle and role model died in a hunting accident.In pursuing his education, he worked as a lay assistant for the Vicar of Dunsden and he attended classes in botany in the University of Reading.
He also attended classes in Old English for free (Kermode and Hollander 2050). He worked as a private tutor in France, teaching English and French at the Berlitz School of Languages. He was drafted in the army on October 21, 1915. He was enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles and started training at Hare Hall Camp in Essex.
He was promoted as the second lieutenant with the Manchester Regiment and that promotion totally changed his life (Fussell 286).In a battle, it is inevitable that he experienced traumatic events that are associated with warfare. One of the traumatic experiences he encountered is when he led his platoon and they get trapped in a shell hole for three days. He then suffered from shell shock and was sent to the hospital in Edinburgh for treatment. In the hospital, while recovering from the injuries and psychological effects of the traumatic events, he met Siegfried Sassoon which was also a poet. Sassoon totally changed the life of Owen (Fussell 286).
Wilfred Owen looked up to Siegfried Sassoon as a hero.After being discharged from the hospital in Edinburgh he was posted in Scarborough for a couple of months and he was associated with the circle of artists to which Sassoon introduced him. Sassoon paved the way for Owen to belong in the artistic circle (Hibberd 513). The artistic circle includes Robert Graves, H. G. Wells, Robert Ross and Arnold Benet.
His association with the artistic circle is confronted with issues especially in his sexual development wherein there are claims that he is a homosexual and that homoeroticism is the main theme of most of Owen’s poems.There are also some speculations that he was having an affair with another poet, C. K. Scott Moncrieff since many of the poet’s work was dedicated to “Mr. W.
O. ” (Hibberd 513). After recovering from the battle, he returned in the military doing light jobs. In March 1918, he was sent to the Northern Command Depot in Ripon.
Ripon is one of the places where he was able to write more poems. After returning to the military front, he went backs in leading troops to dismantle enemy’s brigades in the nearby villages.He was killed in a battle in an encounter in November 4, 1918 at the village of Joncourt. Because of his courage and exemplary leadership, he was eventually awarded with the Military Cross (Fussell 286).
Wilfred Owen’s Poetry Wilfred Owen is known for his poetry that pertains mostly on warfare and battles. His friend, Siegfried Sassoon greatly influenced the tone and voice of Owen’s poems. The influence can be seen mostly in his famous poems such as Dulce et Decorum Est and Anthem for Doomed Youth. Owen’s poems were more widely acclaimed than of his mentor (Owen 58).
Wilfred Owen is also an innovator in his styles of writing. His use of pararhyme and utilization of the consonance is innovative and brilliant. Owen is not the only writer who utilized such techniques but he is one of the first poets that developed and experimented on the techniques extensively. His poetry changes over the years, especially during the years when he is recuperating in the traumatic events he encountered from the battle. His doctor suggested that he translate or transcribe his feelings into writing. Owen started to relive his dreams into various forms of poetry.
His friend, Siegfried Sassoon, is influenced by Freudian Psychoanalysis and helped Owen in doing the exercise. Sassoon showed how poetry works like magic and what it could do to hasten up the treatment and the healing process in general. Owen, on the other hand, tried his hand in writing and followed the style that Sassoon used. The content of the verses formulated by Owen is transformed by injecting Sassoon’s styles. Sassoon put emphasis on realistic views and experiential events that he encountered. At first, it was not the style that was used by Owen.
Owen’s first poems are characterized as light-hearted sonnets. Sassoon greatly contributes on the development and further improvement of Owen’s poems. Owen’s poems are very distinctive and eventually more famous than of his mentor. It is claimed that Wilfred Owen is the greatest poet in relation with warfare presented in the English language. He wrote mostly from personal experience as a second lieutenant of the military and the unparalleled physical, psychological and moral trauma he encountered in the various battles brought by the World War I.His great war poems were all written within the fifteen months period.
Only five poems written by Wilfred Owen were published before he died and one of these five poems is in the form of fragments. His most famous poems include Anthem for Doomed Youth, Dulce Et Decorum Est, The Parable of the Old Man and the Young and Strange Meeting. Some of his poems are featured in the War Requiem by Benjamin Britten. A full unexpurgated collection of his poems was published by Jon Stallworthy in the academic two-volume book of The Complete Poems and Fragments.But still, many of his poems remain unpublished in the popular form.
Wilfred Owen’s sister-in-law donated the various memorabilia and correspondence of his late husband, Harold Owen and his brother, Wilfred Owen. She donated the manuscripts, photographs and letters in the University of Oxford in 1975. Analysis and Significance of Wilfred Owen’s Poems World War I largely contributed in the development of the English culture. It is just hard to determine the extent of significance and extent of the impact of the warfare to the culture.Wilfred Owen is one fine poet shaped by the war and battles he encountered as a soldier (Kermode and Hollander 2050).
Other poets celebrated the beauty and the physical manifestation of beautiful and fine things in the world. Owen’s poems become mere reflections of the reality and the vision of the modern warfare that is going on during the First World War. Wilfred Owen does not only contribute into the introduction of a new genre of poetry or introduction of the new topic which is the warfare. He also developed various techniques that may be utilized in writing.These various techniques greatly influenced the British poetry.
Some of the techniques are the pararhyme and off-rhyme used in Strange Meeting (Kermode and Hollander 2050). Owen’s poetry shows ironic distrust with the traditional ideologies. Ironic in the sense that he is a soldier and the ideologies are what’s keeping the soldiers fighting. But the poems implicitly shows that the distrust is personal emerging from direct experience of pain, violent and sudden death and other horrors of the modern technological warfare that the conventional language is unable to define and embody.Owen’s war poems range from the “expression of a private, even an erotic, sense of being of other men in combat to the most distantly classical formulations.
” (Kermode and Hollander 2050). It is significant to impart the importance of Owen’s poems up to the present since we are also experiencing war nowadays. The poet’s poems are of significant in our time due to the increasing war and bombings that are bothering the members of the society. There is also the issue of the US imperialism and the conflict with social equality and internationalism.The war poems of Wilfred Owen condemn the engagement of nations in warfare and their involvement in battles that are noxious not only in their society but also to their economic and political field. The war poems are significant to be known by youths today especially one of the poems is dedicated to them.
The poem Anthem for Doomed Youth is a poem that is dealing with the issue of the involvement of youth or young men in the war. This is one of Owen’s famous poems.It is a powerful poem that still has an effect to the population today (“Anthem for Doomed Youth Notes”). The poem is merely about the participation of young men in the war and their experiences in the battle field.
The horrors they faced especially the line consisted with “who die as cattle”. The simile depicts the comparison of the young men dying like animals (“Anthem for Doomed Youth Notes”). The next few lines examine the grief and loss that is suffered by their loved ones and the soldiers and depict the empathy for their loss.Knowing for a fact that the soldiers are denied of proper burial service and the battlefield become their resting place away from the people who care for them.
Most of Wilfred Owen’s war poems depict bitterness and show the brutality and morbidity of war and the loss experienced by the relatives of the soldiers. The poems also greatly emphasize the grieving of the soldiers for their loved ones. It is important to impart the teachings and lessons that are presented by Owen’s war poems. The lessons are significant even at the present times.
