Wilfred Owen - Context

Wilfred Owen, context ww1 hospitalised for shell-shockpoetrymodernismemotions and themes1914-19181915 Owen joins1917 coldest winter in living memorystalemate trenches, exposurelack of tech, signals messed upCraglockhart War Hospital, Edinburghpoetry, to makes sense of something which is impossible to comprehendmeets S.Sasson who introduces him too R.Gravesfellow 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.how to deal psychologically with something tht seems to make no senseunreliable narrators and personal experiences. first tanks, issues with shell shock on front line first time it was a major war with major arms trench conditions physical impairments of trench living structure class systemhirachey within armysense of duty shot for cowardice youth of soldiersdifference between how war was portrayed in media at home vs reality of trench warfareculture and society at homejingoismanti-war, cynical disillusionedtransformation from patriotic to disillusionedresponsibility to tell the truth and storiesduty changes owes to dead entrapment what's better life or death?will never escape haunted memoriessurvivors guiltcoping mechanisms suffering injusticepolitical games and pointlessness of warmisery and disparepoems are written to involve the reader shell-shockhighlight problems but changePTSDextremeweather extreme on all sides disorder disability fruitily collective experience collective sufferingconstant use of we and are in poems Sub Topichalf-rhymes.... devices are alot more freeformed, scattered mind. subconsciousdreamshard vowel sounds, punchy and aggressive. words = weapons...uncertainty Sub TopicOwen 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.life 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.influence 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,life the physical and mental trauma of combat.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.After experiencing heavy fighting, he was diagnosed with shellshock. He was evacuated to England and arrived at Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh in June. There he met the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who already had a reputation as a poet and shared Owen's views. Sassoon agreed to look over Owen's poems, gave him encouragement and introduced him to literary figures such as Robert Graves.He returned to France in August 1918 and in October was awarded the Military Cross for bravery.On 4 November 1918 he was killed while attempting to lead his men across the Sambre canal at Ors. The news of his death reached his parents on 11 November, Armistice Day.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 was uncertain if he should enlist 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.”illness 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.“I kept alive on brandy, the fear of death, and the glorious prospect of the cathedral town just below us, glittering with the morning.” In these letters to his mother he directed his bitterness not at the enemy but at the people back in England “who might relieve us and will not.”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;anger towards society 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 warwas speaking with a stammer By autumn he was not only articulate with his new friends and lecturing in the community but was able to use his terrifying experiences in France, and his conflicts about returning, as the subject of poems expressing his own deepest feelings.Sub TopicOwen was a homosexualOwen’s presentation of “boys” and “lads”—beautiful young men with golden hair, shining eyes, strong brown hands, white teeth—has homoerotic elements. Owen’s sexual attitudes in relation to his poetry is the harshness in reference to wives, mothers, or sweethearts of the wounded or disabled soldiers. The fullness of his insight into “the pity of war” seems incomprehensibly limited in the presentation of women in “The Dead-Beat,”
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