Wilfred
Owen
18 March 1893 - 4 November 1918
a. Poet's background and life
On March 18, 1893, Wilfred Owen was born in Oswestry, Shropshire, England. Four years after his birth, he and his family moved to Birkenhead when his grandfather died. He studied at Birkenhead Institute and continued his studies at the Technical School in Shrewsbury when he moved again in 1906.
After failing to gain entrance into the University of London, he spent a year as a lay assistant to Reverend Herbert Wigan in 1911. He then went on to teach in France at the Berlitz School of English. By 1915, he became increasingly interesed in World War I and enlisted himself in the Artists' Rifles group. After his training in England, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant.
In 1917, he was wounded in combat and evacuated to Craiglockhart War Hospital after being diagnosed with shell shock (now known as PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder). There, he met another patient, a poet named Siegfried Sassoon, who served as his mentor and introduced him to well-known literary figures such as Robert Graves and H.G. Wells.
Owen wrote many of his most important poems during this time. Some of the poems were "Dulce et Decorum est" and "Anthem for Doomed Youth". He then rejoined his regiment in Scarborough in June 1918 and returned to France in August. He got killed in November 4, a week before the armistice while he's leading his his men across the Sambre-Oise canal.
b. Poet's general style and body of work
○ Owen has an amazing ability to convey his message about war so a person who doesn't have prior knowledge about war will be able to understand.
○ He used present tense and speech gives his poems a sense of direction and urgency.
○ He also used half-rhyme (also known as slant-rhyme, it is a rhyme in which the stressed syllables of ending consonants match, but the preceding vowel sounds do not match) which shows a dissonant and provoking quality that shadows recurrent themes of his poetry.
○ He also has an ability to write his poems in a quiet tone. It was as if the speaker was whispering his message to the reader. As a result of this, Owen didn't need to write horrifying imagery to support his writing.
c. About "Dulce et Decorum est"
○ The title is from one of Horace's odes, meaning, "it is sweet and right".
○ Horace's full saying ended the poem, meaning, "it is sweet and right to die for your country".
○ The poem was about his experience of a mustard gas attack.
○ The poem was written in 1917 during Owen's recovery from shell shock (now known as post traumatic stress disorder).
○ The poem has uneven lengths.
○ Each stanza of the poem also shows a different story. In the first stanza, Owen wrote about war-weary soldiers. In the next stanza, he wrote about the mustard gas attack itself and how the soldiers reacted to the attack. In the two-line stanza, he wrote how a soldier stumbles and chokes to death after inhaling the gas. This couplet was separated just how it lingered in Owen's consciousness. The last stanza was about their immediate response to the soldier's death and extends out the theme of the poem, that dying in the war for glory is a huge lie.
○ Owen used we, I and you throughout the poem, which was crucial because the poem was a polemic poem (a type of poem that argues about beliefs and opinions of others). The effect of we, I and you made the reader felt as if they were involved in what the speaker is talking about.
d. Event or belief that motivated the poet to write this poem
○ Owen was motivated by the mustard gas attack that he experienced during World War I.
○ He wrote this while he's still recovering at Craiglockhart, under the teachings of Siegfried Sassoon.
○ He wrote this poem because the attack still lingers in him.
e. Anything else which is significant about the poem and poet
○ Owen was the speaker in the poem.
○ Owen based the poem on his actual experience of a mustard gas attack.