Like many soldiers, Wilfred Owen, was faced with harsh tasks. He marched six miles over shelled roads and flooded trenches in the middle of No Man’s Land in the dark. Being a soldiers, among other things, heavily influenced his work. Among those other things, were his mother, his priesthood, and his perceived homosexuality. However Wilfred, was not a poet known to support the war. Wilfred Owen born on March 18, 1893 in Shropshire, England was a famous poet in the time of World War I. Due to many hardships, in 1906 Wilfred was forced to move to Shrewsbury where he continued his studies at a technical institute. “After failing to gain entrance into the University of London, Owen spent a year as a lay assistant to
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He “rejected the traditional cultural narratives that were invoked in order to make the mass destruction of war meaningful or acceptable”(Sanchez-Pardo). Like many of the soldiers, Owen was anti-war. He was tired of seeing soldiers die and citizens making it sound like a heroic thing. Wilfred based his poems off: “Tragedy, Elegy, and War”(Sanchez-Pardo). He refused to write about patriotism and heroism because that was not what war was, it’s only what it is made out to be. In one of his poems, Owen tells a horrifying experience of how he helplessly watched a soldier die during an attack with poison gas. It ended with a line from a Latin Ode written by Horace: “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”(W. Owen,”Dulce et decorum est.”), which translated means “It is sweet and right to die for your country”(Roberts). The phrase used so often in propaganda to urge people to fight and be content with dying for their country. It’s ironic that Owen decides to compare a horrible death to something sweet and right. Wilfred hated that they could say this “old lie”(Owen, “Dulce et decorum est.”) when they knew the unjustified suffering this men were going through. He didn’t see soldiers dying in war as a heroic act of patriotism. He saw it as something tragic. Owen used his poetry to mourn those who died in war not to serve as a way to justify the
He “rejected the traditional cultural narratives that were invoked in order to make the mass destruction of war meaningful or acceptable”(Sanchez-Pardo). Like many of the soldiers, Owen was anti-war. He was tired of seeing soldiers die and citizens making it sound like a heroic thing. Wilfred based his poems off: “Tragedy, Elegy, and War”(Sanchez-Pardo). He refused to write about patriotism and heroism because that was not what war was, it’s only what it is made out to be. In one of his poems, Owen tells a horrifying experience of how he helplessly watched a soldier die during an attack with poison gas. It ended with a line from a Latin Ode written by Horace: “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”(W. Owen,”Dulce et decorum est.”), which translated means “It is sweet and right to die for your country”(Roberts). The phrase used so often in propaganda to urge people to fight and be content with dying for their country. It’s ironic that Owen decides to compare a horrible death to something sweet and right. Wilfred hated that they could say this “old lie”(Owen, “Dulce et decorum est.”) when they knew the unjustified suffering this men were going through. He didn’t see soldiers dying in war as a heroic act of patriotism. He saw it as something tragic. Owen used his poetry to mourn those who died in war not to serve as a way to justify the