An Examination of the ways in which Wilfred Owen depicts the horrors of war in his poems “ Exposure and “Dulce et Decorum Est.”
Wilfred Owen now one of the most well known and admired poets of the last century shocked and intrigued the country with his horrific war poetry. The government had fed the country visions of a glorious and heroic war and Owen was one of the first to show the reality of what trench life on the front was really like. Two of Owens most famous poems are Exposure and Dulce et Decorum Est. Each poem gives the impression of the horrors of war and that in fact it is not how the government have led us to believe. In Exposure Owen shows the pointlessness of war and how men suffered so much pain and misery for such a pathetic cause and are used as merely human sacrifices who’ inevitable end is death. He also shows how war is so slow and that the men’s main foe was the weather and harsh conditions at times rather than the vision of a fast pace action packed glorious battle that ended in victory as so many where led to believe. Dulce et Decorum Est similar in many ways to Exposure as it’s main message is that the saying Dulce et Decorum Est is a lie and that it is not sweet and fitting to die for ones country rather it is the opposite as he shows in the poem