English 102
War Poets Research Paper
9 March 2011
Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon are both considered two of the best war poets to ever write. These two poets actually possess many similarities with Sassoon being a great influence on Owen. With both of them being a part of World War I, that greatly motivated them to write poetry about the war. Neither one of them was very fond of being in the war. This led to them both writing poems of anger and distress towards the war. Both Owen and Sassoon had terrible experiences with war so one can understand where the anger they wrote with came from. Owen’s poems describe actions in the war and how awful and miserable he was as a soldier. Sassoon’s poems do not contain as much of an angry tone as Owen does in his but Sassoon does portray war as being totally negative with nothing good to say about it. Owen and Sassoon are very similar in that neither one of them are war friendly, they had tragedies that made them feel this way, and wrote poems of how they despised World War I. At the time Wilfred Owen was writing his poems, the world was in the middle of a war known as World War I. He considered the subject of his poetry during that time frame to be “the pity of war,” and sought to present the grim realities of battle and its effects on the human spirit. With a subject like this it was obvious that he was not a fan of the war and it shows in many of his poems. The motivation for him to write poems in such grueling detail of the war really shows his true feelings towards it. In his poem “Dulce Et Decorum Est,” he describes his account of war. In it he quotes “Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind…” This clearly shows why he would have such hatred toward war. All throughout the poem he talks of how dismal he and other soldiers are and the terrible experience they had during war. In another one his poems “Anthem for Doomed Youth,”