How Does Wilfred Owens Present The Horrors Of War In The Next War

Wilfred Owen’s poetry revives the horrors of war and displays the inconsistency of war as it dehumanises those who fight, therefore giving our humanity to death. War is portrayed as pitiful, futile and damaging which thus reveals the true aspects of war rather than the propagandist’s view that displays war as heroic and honourable. This was achieved through Owen’s extensive use of visual and aural imagery, which is evident in his poem’s Strange Meeting, The Next War, and Insensibility which all expose the readers to the miserable affect that it had on the soldiers. These poems display powerful connotations of the terrors of war that resulted in the soldiers becoming vulnerable to insensibility.

The shame of war from Owen’s perspective, lies
Owen’s The Next War, stresses that wars will be the cause of spiritual death due to the terrors that it reveals. This poem displays aural and visual imagery that portray the power of death and express the consequences of war, resulting in the soldiers becoming dehumanised. The relationship between death and the soldiers is explored through the line “We've walked quite friendly up to Death”, emphasising the familiarity that has arisen of death. This suggests that war has enforced death upon the soldiers on such a frequent basis that they have begun to consider ‘him’ as a ‘friend’. Another example of this imagery is “He's spat at us with bullets and he's coughed”, signifying the death of an old man where the readers begin to feel pity for him and the soldiers. The verb 'spat' allows the audience to imagine how the bullets sounded when they were shot, giving them a deeper insight to how the soldiers experienced it. This develops Owen's purpose of the dehumanising effect of war in order to shock the readers out of their complacent attitude towards battle. Owen effectively applied imagery to his poem in order to portray the connection between the soldiers, war and death and to also confront the audience with an altered view on war. The power of death displayed in this poem presents the idea of how the soldiers became