212
See also: The Waste Land 213 ■ Catch-22 276P
oets of many nations
wrote of their experiences
of combat in World War I.
They bore witness to the harrowing
events; many of them died young.
Among those most admired are the
English poets: Siegfried Sassoon,
Rupert Brooke, and Wilfred Owen.The pity of war
Owen (1893–1918) worked as a tutor
in France before joining the army.
At first his work was patriotic:
“Anthem for Doomed Youth” tells
of men “who die as cattle” but
closes with “bugles calling for
them from sad shires”—a plaintive
note of tribute. The slaughter on
the Somme, and the influence of
Sassoon, toughened up his verse. In
“Dulce et Decorum Est,” observing
blood “gargling from the froth-
corrupted lungs,” Owen knew that
a witness to the horror would not
repeat to “children ardent for some
desperate glory, / The old Lie: Dulce
et decorum est /Pro Patria mori” (“It
is sweet and fitting to die for one’s
country”). “The poetry,” he said in
a draft preface, “is in the pity.”Some poems focus on the surreal
nightmare. In “The Show,” his
soul looks upon the aftermath of
battle, where dying men crawl
like caterpillars over the ground. In
“Strange Meeting,” the poet meets,
in hell, a loquacious stranger who
claims to be the enemy he “jabbed
and killed.” Owen, when he was
killed at 25, was still learning his
craft. He is valued for his moral and
artistic integrity in powerful poems
about man’s inhumanity to man. ■DULCE ET DECORUM EST
PRO PATRIA MORI
POEMS (1920), WILFRED OWEN
IN CONTEXT
FOCUS
World War I poetsBEFORE
1915 Rupert Brooke, a poet of
war’s noble sacrifice, writes
in his sonnet “The Dead” that
“dying has made us rarer gifts
than gold”—a sentiment
echoed in another sonnet,
“ T he Sold ier.”1916 While serving in the
Foreign Legion, Alan Seeger,
the “American Rupert Brooke,”
writes “I Have a Rendezvous
with Death”—a high-flown,
solemn, prophetic poem later
admired by President Kennedy.1916 A “sardonic rat” scurries
among the dead and the
wounded in Isaac Rosenberg’s
vivid, unrhyming poem “Break
of Day in the Trenches.”1917 The archetype of the
affable but incompetent leader
of men is satirized by Siegfried
Sassoon in “The General.”What passing-bells for these
who die as cattle?- Only the monstrous anger
of the guns.
“Anthem for Doomed
Youth”
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