Heart wrenching, beautiful, shocking. Dulce et decorum est, spring offensive and disabled. You just want to read them loads of times. Just what I needed.

I really enjoyed his poetry, and it was relaxing to read though very sad. Favourites included:

- Inspection
- The dead-beat
- Asleep
- Futility
- The next war
- Greater love

Wilfred Owen was a genius on suffering.

I found Owen's poems rather dark. I guess it does show the atrocities of war. However, I felt that his poems were all doom and gloom.

Devastating, haunting war poetry.

I read a free download version, and also found all poems missing from that version online. There are really not that many effective anti-war poems. These are among the best, and are now over 100 years old. Owen does some different sorts of things with rhyme. His selection of images is intense and in-your-face. "Strange Meeting" is one of the poems you are most likely to come across. It is set in a place after death where those from both sides meet. Even today we tend to separate the dead according to what side or nation they fought for. This poem reminds us through a brilliant dialogue that whatever death might be, all those killed in war share that same result. The other poem that sticks in my mind is a soldier talking to what these days would be called his "dog tag", representing his identity after he is found dead. The only reason I didn't give this book five stars is that the language is at times dated, as might be expected. (I would only reduce it to four and a half stars, but couldn't do that here.)

It doesn't take more than a few lines of Owen's poetry to find yourself plunged into the dark romance of this tragic young poet. One feels the awful loss, of youth and potential cut short, as you read the sometimes scattered, always intense, poems that make up this collection. Owen's work fits perfectly to the literature tone of the time and its historical context - beginning with turn-of-the-century Hardy, Wilde and Lawrence and extending to the poets of the First World War - Sassoon, Graves, Prewitt being the three I'm familiar with - and writers such as Remarque. Immediately, Owen's poetry seems more obtuse and classical than Sassoon's fresh, simple tact. Poems like "Parable of the Old Men and the Young" relies on religious references and is scattered with lo! and thy! They are not as accessible, seem (and in some cases are) unfinished drafts. Some poems are presented as two versions. Owen doesn't rhyme in easy, song-like rhythms, and he doesn't have much of a trace of the dark humour that punctuates Sassoon's poetry. Owen is even more intensely melodramatic, perhaps befitting his unfortunate fate. These are the desperate lyrics of a 25-year old man who nearly survived the Great War only to be killed just before it ended. They are documents of a time of deep injustice and irreparable loss.

Owen is a very graphic lyricist and never shies away from the gore of war. "Mental Cases" is full of blood, eyeballs, the "shatter of flying muscles" and "wading sloughs of flesh". Many of his scenes and his characters are the sick, the injured and the dead. I struggle to imagine there being a more visceral portrayer of war's gruesome innards that Wilfred Owen. It's nightmarish and confused, a Hell on earth. The madness of his descriptions trace a chronology from the religious imagery of William Blake and Dante all the way to the insane war dreamscapes of Thomas Pynchon. This human gore is merged into the shattered, muddy landscapes of the battlefield, land and human merged into one violent mess - "ditches, where they writhed and shrivelled, killed / By them had slimy paths been trailed and scraped / Round myriad warts that might be little hills". The words from "The Show" highlight the way Owen personified the battlefield into a tortured giant that reflected the human pain and death that littered it. It is the concert of the end of days, the "Anthem for Doomed Youth", with "angry guns" that destroy lives and landscapes.

The better poems find a happy medium between his own, captivating style and the more direct language that Sassoon utilizes. His most famous poem, "Dulce et Decorum est", is certainly deserving of its fame. It's a wonderful mixture of powerful figurative language with a lively, narrative dynamic that brings the war and sense of danger into your mind - sharp imperatives like "Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!", interjected with masterful images like "coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge". It's hard to pick the most pivotal lines because it is one of those poems in which every word seems essential, all struggling through the mire to the bitter complaint of the final lines. It is in this poem that Owen best expresses his protest. There is none of the romance of war, no comradeship or humanity. There is only the "old Lie" that sends hopeful, patriotic young men to their deaths for no reason. It must be one of the most vital, horrifying and brilliant poems about war ever written.

There are other great poems, although none of the poems here reach those heights. "The Chances" is another excellent, dynamic poem that captures a moment through dialogue and dialect. Owen suits this voice more than the classical edge to some of his other poems. "Smile, Smile, Smile" is another great poem with a rambling, newsreel style that captures the randomness and the inhumanity of the war, "A Terre" is a gripping, longer poem that again offers snapshots of soldiers' characters and their lives, like forgotten interviews with the dead (An alternative version - addressed to Sassoon - is perhaps even better). "Disabled" and "The End" deal with the aftermath, with the emptiness of hope, reminiscent of the tone of The Return of the Soldier (another book that fits into this cannon of First World War books, an essential voice). Overall, I prefer the sharp wit and catchy verses of Sassoon's poetry, but the two belong together and should be read side by side. At his best, Owen's work is more essential, more incendiary than Sassoon, partly coloured by his tragic death. Alone the thought that such words came out of such experiences is flabbergasting, perhaps even redemptive. But Owen certainly does not want to hide from the pain and the horror. He paints it in thick, bloody gashes across the page.

Wilfred Owen's war poems are what shaped my anti-war stance. I first heard about U.S. involvement in Vietnam in ROTC as a first-year college student. By the time we landed combat troops in Vietnam--March 8, 1965, my 21st birthday--I was firmly opposed to the war. Read this and then tell me about battle glory and proving your manhood:

Dulce et Decorum Est
Wilfred Owen, 1893 - 1918

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

A Book About War

This is what Wilfred Owen called his book of poetry—A book about the horrific deaths soldiers in WWI had to face. His Dulce et Decorum est”, a repudiation of Horace’s claim that it is sweet and honorable to die for one’s native land (Ode 3.2) is heart rending. That this man’s poetic voice was silenced at 19 years old just weeks before the end of the war meant we were prevented from seeing what a genius he could have become. Every poem in this collection is worth every moment spent reading them and we should never forget the sacrifice of all his comrades in all wars.

I'm currently reading a lot of poetry and this book was really good. The poems and the letters are excellent and beautiful. That ending was terribly sad and beautiful.

beautiful

Insightful. A good reminder of the ravages of war. We tend to forget the horrors as wars become history...