Mind Map Gallery Wilfred Owen - Context
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Wilfred Owen - Context
A comprehensive biography mind map about Wilfred Owen. You can easily create your own mind map with EdrawMind. Wilfred Owen (18 March 1893 – 4 November 1918) was an English poet and soldier. He was one of the leading poets of the First World War.
Edited at 2022-02-06 12:46:27
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Wilfred Owen, context
ww1
1914-1918
1915 Owen joins
1917 coldest winter in living memory
first tanks, issues with shell shock on front line
trench conditions
physical impairments of trench living
stalemate trenches, exposure
lack of tech, signals messed up
first time it was a major war with major arms
structure class system
hirachey within army
sense of duty
He returned to France in August 1918 and in October was awarded the Military Cross for bravery.
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.”
“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.”
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.
was 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.
hospitalised for shell-shock
Craglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh
meets S.Sasson who introduces him too R.Graves
poetry
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.
how to deal psychologically with something tht seems to make no sense
unreliable narrators and personal experiences.
highlight problems but change
Sub Topic
collective experience
collective suffering
constant use of we and are in poems
half-rhymes.... devices are alot more freeformed, scattered mind.
subconscious
dreams
hard vowel sounds, punchy and aggressive.
words = weapons...
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 war
modernism
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.
emotions and themes
shot for cowardice
youth of soldiers
difference between how war was portrayed in media at home vs reality of trench warfare
culture and society at home
jingoism
anti-war, cynical
disillusioned
transformation from patriotic to disillusioned
duty changes
owes to dead
responsibility to tell the truth and stories
entrapment
will never escape haunted memories
what's better life or death?
survivors guilt
coping mechanisms
suffering
injustice
political games and pointlessness of war
misery and dispare
extreme
poems are written to involve the reader
shell-shock
PTSD
disorder
disability
fruitily
weather
extreme on all sides
uncertainty
Sub Topic
Sub Topic
life
born 18 March 1893
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.
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.
Owen was a homosexual
Owen’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,”
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.
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;