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Dulce et Decorum
Dulce et Decorum Est
One of Wilfred Owen’s most famous works, the text depicts the horrific scene of a WWI soldier experiencing the effects of chlorine gas in excruciating detail. Upon first reading the text, I was struck by Owen’s incredibly graphic imagery and emotional intensity. The horror, trauma, fear, and rage that came with fighting in the war is so powerfully encapsulated and yet, it’s merely a fraction of what the soldiers have experienced. The latin phrase “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” or “How sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country,” is used ironically in the poem to condemn the war and those who would glorify it.
his poetry
Wilfred Owen | Research Starter
" ... Owen was sent to the front in 1916, shortly after Christmas, with the Lancashire Fusiliers. That spring he fell into a shell hole and suffered a concussion that affected his nerves so that, on June 26, 1917, he was sent back to Craiglockhart Hospital, Edinburgh, where he met and became close to the poet Siegfried Sassoon, a sharp critic of the public illusions regarding the war. It was in the long talks with Sassoon that Owen reached his maturity as a poet. From that time on his poems—including, for example, "Dulce et Decorum Est"—toughened to the task of expressing with both bitterness and deep humanity the conditions and the waste, stupidity, and terror of war ... [Click here to read this research starter]
- Wilfred Owen and Poetic Truth"Although many writers have glanced at Wilfred Owen's ideas of poetic truth, no one has fully defined and documented them; no one has followed him through the profound mental and spiritual struggles in which he was led to reject the kind of poetry which he had once most admired; no one has succeeded in fully correlating his final concept of truth, arrived at through agony and disillusion, with the concept found in his earlier poems. . . ."
- Purgatorial Passions: The Ghost (a.k.a. Wilfred Owen) in Owen's Poetry"For many generations now, Wilfred Owen has been held up as the archetypal war poet, a compelling protester against the inhumanity of World War One and civilian delusions about it, who at 25 was tragically cut down a week before the armistice was signed. In his famous "Preface" to his poems, Owen assigned himself the role of witness to "the pity of War," providing a warning of war's truth for the next generation; to a large extent he succeeded since our perception of World War One, and perhaps of all war, has been indelibly impressed by his truth. Owing to his success, his poems have typically been read as personal only insofar as they convey experience directly related to the battlefront ... "
- Wilfred Owen: The Pity of War"In the early months of 1918 Owen decided on the subject of his poetry, stating it in his Preface in the spring as 'War, and the pity of war'. In settling on the subject of 'pity' he was returning to the beliefs of the Romantics, although he was no doubt also influenced by Hardy and the new direction in Sassoon's work ... "
- The Disciplines of the Wars: Army Training and the Language of Wilfred Owen"Wilfred Owen enlisted with the Artists' Rifles and began his army training in October 1915. He had recently returned to England after two years teaching in France, first at the Berlitz School in Bordeaux and then as a free-lance tutor. In 1915 he was twenty-two and he already thought of himself as a poet, though he had published nothing. In a letter in June he mentions having found in Belloc a quotation from Alfred de Vigny: 'If any man despairs of becoming a Poet, let him carry his pack and march in the ranks' (Collected Letters, p. 342).1 It was an ambiguous piece of advice ... "
- The Poet of War: On Wilfred Owen"The name and the genius of Wilfred Owen were first revealed by the publication of his finest poem, “Strange Meeting,” in the anthology Wheels a year ago. I still remember the incredible shock of that encounter, the sudden, profound stirring by the utterance of a true poet. Since that time other fragments of Owen's work have been made known, and if none so evidently bore the impress of poetic mastery as “Strange Meeting,” they were a part of that achievement. We could be sure that when the promised volume of his poetry appeared it would be single, coherent, and unique ... "
- War Poets"Like many of the poets and artists of his time, Wilfred Owen professed a strong interest in the theater and supposedly drafted a play while recovering from shell shock in Craiglockhart military hospital in 1917, although no manuscript has appeared. Owen’s letters, which have been collected, deserve mention for two reasons. First, the style reflects both the poetic temper of the man and the adherence to detail reflective of an age of correspondence that will probably never return. Second, and perhaps more important, Owen’s letters record the transitions typical of most British soldiers who survived on the front for a long time: from resolve to do the soldier’s duty, to disgust, fear, and depression, to the solemn acceptance of fate that extended service produced ... "
dulce
Dulce et Decorum Est
- Dulce et Decorum Est: Analysis of Setting"No-man’s-land. Dangerous zone between facing enemy lines that could be on any of a number of World War I battlefields, sites that were fought over for months and years until the land became an eerie moonscape of craters, unexploded shells, and land leached of all nutrients by noxious residues of powders and gas. This gray world is lighted only by phosphorescent gases and flares; its sounds are those of exploding shells and dying men..."
- The Poet as Rhetor: A Reading of Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est”."The year 2018 marks the centennial of Wilfred Owen’s death and provides an appropriate opportunity for a reexamination of the poet’s work. One of Owen’s best-known poems, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” though much anthologized, has not received the close scrutiny it deserves, particularly in terms of its linguistic and rhetorical features. While the poem’s intensely felt emotions and horrific imagery capture the reader’s attention at first, upon closer examination it is the artful diction, syntax, and construction of the argument that prove particularly compelling ... "
- Dulce et Decorum Est"Many of Wilfred Owen’s poems, including “Dulce et Decorum Est,” paint in stark images the brutality of war. Having fought in some of the bloodiest action of World War I, Owen wished to warn his English countrymen that the horrors of combat far outweigh its glory. He believed that those writers and politicians at home who championed the necessity of war did so only because they had not experienced its suffering—the suffering of the poem’s dying soldier poisoned by mustard gas, his “white eyes writhing in his face,” the blood “gargling” from his lungs ... "
- War Poets and the Ageless Anger of Achilles."The article focuses on war poets. It says that these poets were usually observers or historians before the First World War and they were rarely seen and rarely survived in a time when surgical and medical practices were primitive or nonexistent. The article also examines the poem "Dulce et Decorum Est," by Wilfred Owen and another one by Brian Turner ... "
- Dulce et Decorum Est"Dulce et Decorum Est Many of Wilfred Owen’s poems, including 'Dulce et Decorum Est,' paint in stark images the brutality of war. Having fought in some of the bloodiest action ... "
- Dulce et Decorum Est Summary & Analysis"Dulce et Decorum Est" is a poem by the English poet Wilfred Owen. Like most of Owen's work, it was written between August 1917 and September 1918, while he was fighting in World War 1. Owen is known for his wrenching descriptions of suffering in war. In "Dulce et Decorum Est," he illustrates the brutal everyday struggle of a company of soldiers, focuses on the story of one soldier's agonizing death, and discusses the trauma that this event left behind. He uses a quotation from the Roman poet Horace to highlight the difference between the glorious image of war (spread by those not actually fighting in it) and war's horrifying reality ... "
