earticle

영어

This essay is designed to view Owen's antiwar poetry in relation to the First World War. At the beginning of the First World War the characteristic response to it was that to serve in the war was a matter of duty. Rupert Brooke's “The Soldier” is a typical example of this attitude. The poem celebrates the glories of war and patriotism of soldiers. Owen joined the army because patriotism and nationalism affected him. At first Owen portrayed the war as glorious. After he was sent to the front and experienced the Somme offensive that destroyed too many young good soldiers, he realized that the war was the most lamentable tragedy of fine young men lost in the battle. He was diagnosed as suffering from shell shock and sent to hospital. There he met Sassoon who put emphasis on realism and satire. Sassoon had a profound influence on Owen's poetic style, and Owen decided to write poetry devoted to portraying the horrors of trench and gas warfare. Now he said that his subject was war, and the pity of war. In his poems he started to describe the horrors of a gas attack while commenting ironically on the limits of patriotism. Owen came to see it as a duty to warn the horrors of war and to ask why political leaders allowed such mass destruction to continue for so long. For example, in his “Dulce et Decorum Est,” he described the nightmarish atmosphere of the battle and went on to portray the absolute values of nationalism such as honour or patriotism as an old lie and questioned the values. He also questioned the necessity of war, stressed the common humanity of both sides in war, and linked the futility of the deaths of individual soldiers to the cosmic indifference of a world from which God was absent. Owen's poetry also shows a major technical innovation which influenced Modernism a lot. Owen's innovative use of half-rhyme is a pervasive feature of his poetry. While full rhyme tends to put stress on completeness, half-rhyme suggests that things are incomplete. Owen's use of half-rhyme functions as strengthening the bleak landscape surrounding the war.