Dulce Et Decorum Est, By Wilfred Owen

Disheartened by the horrific bloodshed of war such as the Battle of the Somme and WWI, modernists broke away from the traditional ways of everything, rejecting them and shifting their views on the world through individualism and experimentation. As asserted by Plato on the quote above, a person given the chance to venture out in the world of truth will be seen as corrupted and foolish by the ignorant mass once he comes back into the cave of lies, therefore alienated. Factors of war that caused modernists to scorn traditional ways will be examined in Wilfred Owen’s war poem ‘’Dulce Et Decorum Est,’’ while alienation and individualism will be examined in poetic masterpieces by Edgar Allan Poe, ‘’Alone’’ and T.S Eliot’s ‘’The Love Song of J. Alfred
Wilfred Owen, whose ‘’poetic genius was summoned by the shocking violence of modern war’’ (Dulce Et Decorum Est), wrote a poetic war masterpiece titled ‘’Dulce Et Decorum Est’’ and was killed one week before the war ended, he was twenty five years old. ‘’Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge..,’’ (Stanza 1; lines 1-2). Herein, Owen asserts the hardships he and his squadrons went through during WWI for the sake of the Motherland driven by ‘’the old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria moria’’ (Stanza 4; lines 27-28) fed to them by the Royals, which translates in English to ‘’It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.’’ This dictum was the soldiers’ motivation to go and sacrifice their lives for the sake of their country, blindly obeying to it without any examination, just like the Nazi soldiers that contributed to the Holocaust. This falsification of the Royals led to the deaths of thousands, thus caused modernists to regard everything as false, rejecting the ideas of religion, government