Reading Poetry
...and Anthem for Doomed Youth. Both poems are on the subject of war, which Owen had great experience of as he was active on the front lines in France in 1915. Suffering from shell shock he was returned back to England where he wrote poems. Both poems depict Owen's anger towards the war but in different ways.
Owen re-joined the troops out in France and was killed on 4th November 1918, just seven days before the end of World War I. The reason I chose these poems is that my own Great-Grandfather was killed in World War I in France in 1915, aged just 23. Owen's poems help to paint a truer picture of what it was really like for the brave men who gave their lives for their country. This affects the way that I read the poems. It stirs within me immense emotion, as instead of the glorification of war, the true horror of what these men went through emerges through every line. They put me, if only for a little while, in the shoes of my Great-Grandfather and helped me to realise what he must have gone through at such a tender age. Anthem for Doomed Youth affects me more, as my Great-Grandfather never had the traditional funeral, his body was never recovered. All we have to mourn him is a cross with his name on it in France alongside thousands of others. The Gestalt theory of reader-response reception suggests that for every reader the understanding of the poem will be unique to them according to their own lives and experiences.
Dulce est Decorum est is arguably one of Owen's most famous poems. Its title refers to a quotation from the Roman poet Horace. The full quote is Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori' which means It is sweet and appropriate to die for one's country'. At the time when Owen wrote this poem it was thought it was a direct response to the poetry that Jesse Pope wrote. It was felt that he thought she trivialised the war in rousing and...
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