That there’s some corner of a foreign fieldīrooke is another famous poet of WWI, although he died relatively early on in the conflict and wrote very different kind of war poetry from Owen and Sassoon. (See WWI blogger Grace Freeman’s pick of ten of the finest Sassoon poems here.) This sonnet is not his best-known, but it’s a moving depiction of the longing the ordinary soldier felt for home, his loved ones, and the normal life he’d left behind. Sassoon even played an important role in helping to inspire and encourage the taut style of Owen’s poetry. The manuscript of the poem is also fascinating.Īlong with Owen, Sassoon was among the most celebrated of WWI poets and one of the sharpest documenters of what Owen called ‘the pity of War’. Listen to the actor Christopher Eccleston read Owen’s poem here. The poetry is in the pity.’ We’ve selected some of Wilfred Owen’s best poems here. As he put it in the draft preface he wrote for his poems: ‘My subject is War, and the pity of War. ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ is a fine example of Owen’s superb craftsmanship as a poet: young he may have been, and valuable as his poetry is as a window onto the horrors of the First World War, in the last analysis the reason we value his response to the horrific events he witnessed is that he put them across in such emotive but controlled language, using imagery at once true and effective. However, the poem is also a harrowing and vivid account of a poison gas attack, with a number of details which immediately stick in the memory, and haunt our dreams as they haunted Owen’s, showing how naive and damaging outlooks like Jessie Pope’s really were. Indeed, Pope is the ‘friend’ whom Owen addresses directly in the closing lines of the poem. One of the most famous of all war poems, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ (the title is a quotation from the Roman poet Horace, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori or ‘it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country’) was written in response to the jingoistic pro-war verses being written by people like Jessie Pope. (Tragically, the telegram informing Owen’s mother that her son had been killed in action the week before arrived the day of the Armistice, while everyone else was celebrating the end of the war.) Sweet! and decorous!’ Although he drafted the poem that October, the surviving drafts of ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ show that Owen revised and revisited it on several occasions thereafter, before his death the following November – just one week before the Armistice. In October 1917, Wilfred Owen wrote to his mother from Craiglockhart Hospital: ‘Here is a gas poem, done yesterday…….the famous Latin tag (from Horace, Odes) means of course it is sweet and meet to die for one’s country. His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin… If in some smothering dreams, you too could paceĪnd watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
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