Wilfred Owen's War Poetry "My object is war and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity."

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        Wilfred Owen’s War Poetry

Wilfred Owen’s War Poetry

“My object is war and the pity of war.

The poetry is in the pity.”

                                                      -Wilfred Owen

An author’s context always has a substantial influence on the text’s they write.  We will also find this holds true for poetry, if not more so.  Poetry is often considered a collection of emotions generated from its writer and we can see this by not only analysing a poem, but by taking into consideration the poet’s life as well.  One such example is Wilfred Owen.  Owen’s poetry has been greatly influenced by his context, and not only by his involvement in World War 1 but the friendships he made in that time.  Through knowing Owen’s context we can interpret how the social, political and historical climate of the world influenced his poetry.

Wilfred Owen was born in March, 1893.  The course of his life changed many times before he went to war.  After finishing school he became a parish assistant before abandoning religion and finally becoming a professor of English.  It has never been clearly stated why he abandoned Christianity but we will look into how it has effected his poetry later.  In 1910 Owen met Christoble Coleridge, daughter of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and their friendship, together with his skills as an English teacher, is how Owen’s passion for poetry began.  It was not long after England declared war on August 4th, 1914, that Wilfred Owen enlisted with the ‘Artists Rifles Regiment’ as a cadet.  In 1915 Owen was commissioned as 2nd Lieutenant of the ‘Manchester’s Regiment’, and in 1917 was sent to the front line at the battle of Serre.  At some stage during that battle Owen was concussed and spent several days in a bomb creator with the corpse of a fellow officer.  Whilst recovering at Craiglockhart War Hospital, Owen met the poet Siegfried Sassoon who became the greatest influence in Owen’s work.  In August 1918 Owen returned to the war where he was killed in action on the 4th November, 1918.

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When the poetry of Wilfred Owen is read there are many instances where we can see direct parallels to events in his life.  Let’s consider Owen’s becoming an apostate.  There are many parts of his work that indicate an abandonment of religion, the best example being “Le Christianisme”.  The very first line, “So the church of Christ was hit and buried”, is symbolic of Owen deferring from Christianity.  However the rest of the poem, in particular the second stanza, can be interpreted as Owens’s resentment of such a change.  We can see in other poems this ‘resentment’ and perhaps ...

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