A Critical Study of Wilfred Owen’s Poetry with Special Emphasis on His War Poems

Abstract

Through a critical study of Owen's war poems, the thesis tried to show Owen's effort, quite successful most of the time, to transmute his war experience into a poetry that has its own sense of beauty. The more he goinvolved in the suffering and pains of his fellow soldiers, the more he succeeded in depicting the brutality of war..

As an admirer of the Romantics, Owen's early poems bear traces of romanticism. The outbreak of war, however, redirected Owen's poetic gifts. Witnessing the pains of soldiers and suffering the bestial nature of war, he claimed /!War and the pity of War" (Preface) as the subject matter of his poems and defined his aim to be communicating "the truth untold" ("Strange Meeting" 24) to the nonchalant civilians at home.

This process of communicating the true nature of war was first delivered by means of a direct self-expression through which Owen followed the satirical tone of Sassoon in a number of poems. Yet later, Owen found this style too flippant to arouse the reader's pity. Thus·, he adopted a different attitude, namely, the attitude of the report on the experience. Through this attitude· Owen did succeed in reconciling the following premises, central to the romantic tradition, the function of the poet, the cult of beauty, and the concept of negative capability, with the severe experience of war. The romantic concept of the poet's task as reading the secrets of the universe was applied by Owen in his war poems. In his poetry however, it takes the form of his