Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori

Two pieces of art can be from very different time periods and can be created in two different types of styles, but at the same time can be related in many ways. Not only this, but the two pieces may even have different types of subjects and meanings that are being portrayed in the paintings, but they can still be linked together in certain ways. This can be seen with El Greco’s “Burial of Count Orgaz” and Benjamin West’s “The Death of General Wolfe,” in which are from two very different time…

The starless sky was casket-black and brooding. Even the clouds seemed morose. Frozen hands clasped algid steel as the Kelly gang gazed upon their foe. The cold, malevolent wind howling and mewled through Dan and the souls of the Kelly gang in every which way. “Bang!” A fierce sound of bullet from the police startled Dan’s ears. The last stand of the Kelly gang has begun. “Fire!” Dan’s brother Ned shouted with a quivering voice. It was Dan’s first time seeing his brother getting extremely…

“The Dacca Gauzes” by Agha Shahid Ali, is another more traditionally formatted piece (with easy to follow, short stanzas, that still pack a punch.) Ali’s piece is also personal, but at the same time takes on a view of society in that Ali writes of a community (that of the world outside of the United States and United Kingdom) that is not always heavily addressed in more contemporary English-language poetry. In the piece, readers are exposed to this via Ali’s grandmother, who comments to him on…

Wilfred Owen’s Disabled is poem of the post-Great War period, when hundreds of young men were -similarly to the protagonist- abandoned to their misery and handicaps in military hospitals. The intentionally vague and indistinguishable character is presented as empty, an indicator of his inability to recover. However, despite his superficial remorse and apathy, we can distinguish an underlying message; Owen portrays the value of an individual in society as both fleeting and unappreciated. He uses…

Wilfred Owen and John McCrae are two of the most celebrated war poets from the First World War who have written poetry that is still read to this day. War poetry deals with gruesome, heartbreaking, harsh and sometimes happy details of the war that are generally faced by soldiers first hand. War poetry is the writing of experiences, horrors, traumas of war generally experienced first-hand by soldiers who have fought wars. Apart from the themes of suffering, conflict, death and horror the poems…

Under Fire: The Story of a Squad was released by Henri Barbusse in December of 1916, still during the heat of World War I. The novel is written based off of Barbusse's own notes that wrote while in the trenches. It is one of the rare books about the war that released during the war and that painted the life of a soldier in such a realistic and brutal manner. The book is an important piece of war literature because it covers not only the intense scenes of fighting, but also the more mundane, but…

Mark Twain, in his juvenalian essay “The War Prayer” (1923) lambasts war and the motivations behind fighting them. He supports his argument by incorporating potent sarcastic diction, utilizing hyperbole, and by the use of hypocrisy. Twain’s purpose is to convey the absurdity of war and to examine what he believes to be the asinine motivations behind going to war, especially those of a religious and patriotic nature, in the hope that future conflict is avoided. He adopts an ironic tone (“An aged…

In writing of his own experience in the Iraq War, Turner creates a style of writing, which is seen as a witness of war in poetry. Brian Turner’s “16 Iraqi Policemen”, and Autopsy is so startling and it is able to leap off the pages and have a grip onto the reader where it refuses to let go. Adding to this, these poems are able to give a taste of what it was like being apart of the Iraqi war, and what it was like to be a bystander. At times Brian Turner is brilliant with how he is able to connect…

“War is hell” (O’Brien 1154). That simple line enlightens so much about what war is and how it is portrayed throughout this short story. The author contradicts himself as he tells the story, to make the point that every contradiction has a story in its own. Three of the most memorable quotes are, “…war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty” (1155). “War makes you a man; war makes you dead” (1155). Lastly, “In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, … in…

Writers protest war using imagery, irony, and structure. Imagery is vital in showing civilians war. In “War Is Kind” by Stephen Crane, readers can see “[a] field where a thousand corpses lie”(11 Crane). This reveals the effects of war. In “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen a horrific event, ”If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood”(21 Owen), takes place. In Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers the disgust of war is displayed to the audience through the author’s words, “...the husks of dogs…