An analysis of the poetry of Wilfred Owen with specific reference to language used.

Authors Avatar

Laura Harvey                                     4Ng                                        15th January 2004

Wilfred Owen.[1893-1918]

The Last Laugh.

The Send Off.

The Anthem for Doomed Youth.

An analysis of the poetry of Wilfred Owen with specific reference to language used.

    Wilfred Owen was an English poet who specialised in writing about the war. Owen was born on 18th March 1893 in Oswestry. He was the son of a railway worker and the eldest of four children. Owen started his education at the Birkenhead Institute and then continued his education at the Shrewsbury Technical School. Wilfred Owen then started work as a pupil-teacher at Wyle Cop School while he prepared for his matriculation exam for the University of London. After failing to win a scholarship, in 1913, he found work as an English teacher at the Berlitz School in Bordeaux. In October 1915 he joined the army. The next he knew was that he was fighting at the Somme. He returned to England and was put in hospital only two years after he joined up in 1917 because of shellshock. Explosions from nearby shells and the content of the war caused the shellshock in general. Owen was send to Craiglockhart Hospital, in Edinburgh, and met Siegfried Sassoon, another war poet. In August 1918 Owen was declared fit and returned to the Western front. He fought at Beaurevoir-Fonsomme, where he was awarded the Military Cross. Wilfred Owen died on 4th November 1918, killed by machine gun fire leading his men across the Sambre Canal, just a week before the Armistice was signed.

Join now!

    The poetry Owen wrote reveals his feelings towards the ordinary soldier during wartime. Wilfred Owen’s poetry conveys a graphic and more truthful tale of war than the propaganda of the time. Owen made people understand how bad it actually was by using extremely powerful images of the worst bits. Owen criticises propaganda as it made people believe the wrong things. He wanted to get through to people that the war experience was not full of glory and recognition as they all thought. In the poem ‘Dulce et Decorum est,’ he criticises propaganda as there is nothing sweet ...

This is a preview of the whole essay

Here's what a star student thought of this essay

Avatar

The Quality of Written Communication is also excellent. There is a very adept handling of the English language in shaping the response, and evidence that this candidate is a very confident writer, with her use of complex vocabulary, punctuation and grammatical sentence syntax. This varies the response and makes it feel less prescribed - a Godsend for examiners who have to marks essays with laboriously similar structures for the most part.

The Level of Analysis here is extremely good. The focus on the specific words, phrases and poetic devices use by Owen in these three poems is indicative of someone who operate as a solid A grade. Though I would argue that the structure of the poems, whilst not at the forefront of what the question asks, is also important to comment on in all of the poems, rather than just 'Anthem for Doomed Youth'. Where this candidate could've saved a lot of time is in their own essay structure. Instead of analysing poem by poem, candidate should aim to analyse point by point i.e. comment on the use of emotive language and then analyse it's use in the three poems in turn as one paragraph. Then, moving onto the next paragraph, talk about something like metaphors, similes and personification and analyse the use of this in the three poems, etc., etc. Doing this actively encourages comparison between the poems within the same paragraph and making the comparative points more obvious e.g - "In 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' Owen uses [...] Whereas in 'The Last Laugh' he uses [...]" - this kind of comparison shows a candidate that does not segregate their answer by the poems and is therefore not taking them in turn but commenting on all aspects of the three poems at the same time - a sign of a true top marks student so it is highly recommended that this essay structure is adopted by candidate hoping to achieve high grades.

This is a response to a question comparing the language Wilfred Owen uses in his poems 'The Send-Off', 'The Last Laugh' and 'Anthem for Doomed Youth'. Once past the first paragraph, there is an excellently demonstrated focus on the question, with an undivided adherence to the steer and an astutely specific reference to language. With regards to that first paragraph - a little context is always a very good use of time before an exam because it demonstrate an incentive to conduct independent research to fortify candidates' answers, but I would argue it would prove more useful to comment on the context of the poems (When were they written? What state of mind with regard to War did Owen have at this time? A knowledge of Owen's experiences at Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh will be useful here), rather than a biography of the poet. The first paragraph earns very few marks if any at all, because even though there is contextual appreciation abundant, it is not tied in with the analysis and is left to stand-alone as a detached chunk of text that wastes a lot of exam time and/or squanders word limit for coursework. Candidates should aim to integrate context - but only if it is relevant.