Poetry (Lowell, Plath & Owen)
...anthology The World's Contracted Thus' has presented the thoughts and views of several poets, with many of these poets holding a gloomy' outlook on life. This point is further exemplified through the poetry of Wilfred Owen, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath. Wilfred Owen places extensive emphasis on the meaning of life and the meaning of war while Robert Lowell seems to be more concerned with more personal issues such as his mother's death and then there is Sylvia Plath who is even more introverted through her poetry and focuses heavily on analysing her own thought processes and suicidal tendencies. On studying ach of these poets and their words I have come away from the experience feeling quite depressed.
Wilfred Owen is a poet who writes with such passion of personal experiences that a sense of sadness and gloom is created through his poems. Owen's poems are strongly based on the effects of war on himself, and his world. Owen is an insomniac, as expressed through his poem, Dulce Et Decorum Est, when he writes, "In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams you too could pace/ Behind the wagon that we flung him in". This poem is has such an effect on the reader, from the beginning of the poem when Owen describes the battlefield on which he fought in the war and the horrific gas attack with one man dying horribly and painfully as he could not get his gas mask on in time. Owen must also be commended for the vivid use of similes, "coughing like hags
flound'ring like a man in fire or lime
obscene as cancer", just as Sylvia Plath uses in her poem Balloons and the use of alliteration, "Knock-kneed
ecstacy of fumbling, Fitting
white eyes writhing", that the reader can't help but be affected by the strong message Owen has created. Through the fourth stanza Owen expresses his own suffering, and...
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