Wilfred Owen - Context

1914-1918

udging by his first letters to his mother from France, one might have anticipated that Owen would write poetry in the idealistic vein of Rupert Brooke: “There is a fine heroic feeling about being in France. ...” But by January 6, 1917 he wrote of the marching, “The awful state of the roads, and the enormous weight carried was too much for scores of men.”

“I kept alive on brandy, the fear of death, and the glorious prospect of the cathedral town just below us, glittering with the morning.”

On March 19, he was hospitalized for a brain concussion suffered six nights earlier, when he fell into a 15-foot-deep shell hole while searching in the dark for a soldier overcome by fatigue.

was speaking with a stammer

Craglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh

poetry, to makes sense of something which is impossible to comprehend

fellow comrades

new genre of modernism, impact on society and all forms of art and literatur, sizemic shift, rejecting traditional techniques and develop a different way of connecting with the reader.

highlight problems but change

collective experience

half-rhymes.... devices are alot more freeformed, scattered mind.

hard vowel sounds, punchy and aggressive.

He may also have helped him confront his shyness; his intense involvement with his mother and his attempt, at the same time, to become more independent; his resentment of his father’s disapproval of his ambition for a career as a poet; his ambivalence about Christianity and his disillusionment with Christian religion in the practices of the contemporary church; his expressed annoyance with all women except his mother and his attraction to other men; and his decision to return to his comrades in the trenches rather than to stay in England to protest the continuation of the war

Owen wrote vivid and terrifying poems about modern warfare, depicting graphic scenes with honest emotions; in doing so, young Owen helped to advance poetry into the Modernist era.

The disillusionment that grew out of the war contributed to the emergence of modernism, a genre which broke with traditional ways of writing, discarded romantic views of nature and focused on the interior world of characters.

shot for cowardice

youth of soldiers

difference between how war was portrayed in media at home vs reality of trench warfare

anti-war, cynical

entrapment

what's better life or death?

suffering

shell-shock

weather

uncertainty

Sub Topic

born 18 March 1893

After school he became a teaching assistant and in 1913 went to France for two years to work as a language tutor. He began writing poetry as a teenager.

Owen was a homosexual

His great friend, the poet Siegfried Sassoon, later had a profound effect on his poetic voice, and Owen's most famous poems ("Dulce et Decorum est" and "Anthem for Doomed Youth") show direct results of Sassoon's influence.

Writing from the perspective of his intense personal experience of the front line,

he spent a second year in France with a Catholic family, tutoring their two boys. As a result of these experiences, he became a Francophile.

He had worshipped Keats and later Shelley during adolescence; during his two years at Dunsden he had read and written poetry in the isolated evenings at the vicarage;