Wilfred Owen Techniques
Wilfred Owens war poetry
Good morning/afternoon teacher and peers,
Wilfred Owen was born in 1893 in Oswestry (United Kingdom). He wanted to be a poet from the age of nineteen although most of his famous work is that which he wrote in his years spent in the war where he died in 1918.
The preface to Owens poetry read:
“This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.
Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except war.
Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.
My subject is war, and the pity of war.
The poetry is in the pity.
To help tell you how Owen uses poetic techniques to achieve the objective stated above i will provide an analysis of his poetry in general.
Matter
All of Owens poetry we have studied is based around the horrors of war and the physical and emotional trauma that it caused to those that experienced it firsthand. The themes that are strongly expressed are those of horror, pain and ultimately death.
Owen effectively expresses feeling that helps to create an emotional response for the reader by the depressing sometimes even shocking nature of his poems that depict the overall dark mood (emotional atmosphere) of the poetry. We can see examples of this shockingness in poems such as mental cases and disabled when it speaks of how they had to wade through sloughs of flesh treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter in reference to how they were forced to at times physically wade through the corpses of those who they had watched die and how a leap of purple spurted from his thigh when the blood left his body where his leg used to grow.
Manner
Most of Owens poems don’t strictly follow a set poetic form and we even see a combination of both in some cases such as the poem Futility which is basically a short lyric, about the length of a sonnet though not structured as one, being divided into seven line stanzas.
Owens writing
Good morning/afternoon teacher and peers,
Wilfred Owen was born in 1893 in Oswestry (United Kingdom). He wanted to be a poet from the age of nineteen although most of his famous work is that which he wrote in his years spent in the war where he died in 1918.
The preface to Owens poetry read:
“This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.
Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except war.
Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.
My subject is war, and the pity of war.
The poetry is in the pity.
To help tell you how Owen uses poetic techniques to achieve the objective stated above i will provide an analysis of his poetry in general.
Matter
All of Owens poetry we have studied is based around the horrors of war and the physical and emotional trauma that it caused to those that experienced it firsthand. The themes that are strongly expressed are those of horror, pain and ultimately death.
Owen effectively expresses feeling that helps to create an emotional response for the reader by the depressing sometimes even shocking nature of his poems that depict the overall dark mood (emotional atmosphere) of the poetry. We can see examples of this shockingness in poems such as mental cases and disabled when it speaks of how they had to wade through sloughs of flesh treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter in reference to how they were forced to at times physically wade through the corpses of those who they had watched die and how a leap of purple spurted from his thigh when the blood left his body where his leg used to grow.
Manner
Most of Owens poems don’t strictly follow a set poetic form and we even see a combination of both in some cases such as the poem Futility which is basically a short lyric, about the length of a sonnet though not structured as one, being divided into seven line stanzas.
Owens writing