A Comparison Between Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ and ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ and Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘Does It Matter?’ and ‘Suicide in the Trenches’
Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ and ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ are both poems that protest against and depict the subject of war. They both follow Wilfred Owen’s angst against those who encourage war and the savagery of warfare that he experienced himself. His poetry was devised to strike at the conscience of England during the World War. Owen’s mother had encouraged him to write poetry from an early age and when he was old enough he travelled to France to teach English when the war broke out. He then went on to join the army and the horrors that he faced completely changed his life. Having being injured in battle, he met Siegfried Sassoon, also injured, in a hospital and went on to encourage each other’s poetry and Sassoon, a well educated man, helped him to improve his drafts. Wilfred Owen felt a sense of duty to inform the public of the terrible conditions and suffering taking place during the war and quoted, ‘Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is war, and the pity of war. The Poetry is in the pity.’ (R. P. Hewett, 1989, ‘A Choice of Poets’, p. 154) This is an extraordinary statement for a poet to make as it sets aside the rules of art and poetry, and leads him to write some of his most successful poems. He became a metaphorical spokesman for all the millions of soldiers that shared his experiences and is now seen as the most influential of the many poets of the First World War. ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ is a powerful poem, which tells of the exhausted and battered troops returning from the frontline and being subject to a gas attack. Wilfred Owen used many ugly textured words in this poem: the troops are described as “old beggars” and “fatigued” showing how tired and miserable they were as they “cursed through the sludge”. They are then alerted with the gas attack when a man cries out. This is followed by what is described as an “ecstasy of fumbling” depicting how clumsy their movements were as they were