The Distinctive Qualities of Owen's Poetry
The distinctive qualities of a text are the things that make it unique to that poet. Consider the themes and ideas of the poem. Consider the language features favoured by the poet. If you had a collection of poems from a variety of poets, how would you recognise the poetry of Wilfred Owen? What are the 'distinctive qualities' that would make his poetry stand out from the rest?
Subject Matter
In his poetry Owen focused on the realities of conflict and its emotional and psychological impact rather than with any glorified trappings. His first hand experience gave authority to his depictions of war’s carnage, described in one of his letters home as, “the universal pervasion of Ugliness. Hideous landscapes, vile noises...everything unnatural, broken, blasted”. His didactic purpose was to expose the propagandist lies that enticed young men to enlist and to show how it dehumanized and brutalized them. He also tried to awaken the social conscience and public outcry as the only way to put a stop to the senseless butchery. Giving the eulogy at Owen’s funeral, Sassoon described him as a “poet of peace” who wrote of the “soldier’s experience” in ways that could “be used in times of peace to understand human nature.”
Poetic Devices
Recurring images of youth, innocence, waste and sacrifice provide linking threads between the poems. These concepts are couched in descriptive verse depicting slaughter, death and suffering. War is personified as a powerful, destructive entity. It is demonized as something evil, grotesque, vicious and merciless. It is made to appear as a ‘fiend-like’ enemy that heartlessly maims and destroys. Such representational techniques give us some sense of the overwhelming sensory impact of war. We are made to feel, see, hear and smell the horrors of the battlefield and to pity the poor wretches who struggled to exist in its midst. Satiric irony and explicit visual and aural imagery helps denote the battlefront as a hellish place.
Comparative techniques such as simile, metaphor, personification and hyperbole help make the reader a surrogate participant or eye-witness. His use of comparison and stark contrast allow him to juxtapose ideas and images in innovative ways that generate reflection and evaluation. Rhetorical methods, including alliteration, assonance, inversion, onomatopoeia, rhetorical questions, antithesis, exclamation and apostrophe give added impact to the imagery. Paradox and irony, as well as rhetorical questions challenge readers to see the truth about war. Owen also uses rhyme effectively, experimenting with both full rhyme where the sound is almost identical such as mud/blood” and para-rhyme, which makes use of consonant end-rhyme such as “tall/toil”.
Imagery
His poetry is rich in imagery and symbolism which creates repulsive, haunting images of death and suffering. Biting satire and sensory and nature imagery are used to mock traditional concepts of honour, glory and the heroic ordeal. Imagery relating to weather, flowers and the sun are also given different connotations alongside those of death, blood and suffering. Nature is presented as both a benevolent force as well as one that rages in fury against soldiers on the battlefield or freezes them into eternal sleep as found in Futility. Owen disorients his readers, denying them the opportunity to remain passive in the face of what is being revealed.
His imagery is also often associated with the passage of time, “hour after hour”, or of night and day, “this morning”, or with references to sunlight and dark, dawn, twilight and dusk. Such references give a temporal context to his subject. Colour imagery is also used with dramatic impact. Red and crimson become representative of blood, slaughter and death while by contrast, yellows and gold are more commonly equated with nature, warmth and life. The negativity often associated with white, grey and black in turn helps define the emotional emptiness and suffering of war.
Tone
In Owen’s verse, there is always an underlying tone of condemnation and bitter scorn. This is coupled with disgust, as he vilifies those who are responsible for sending young boys to war. Tonal shifts strengthen the comparisons he makes between war and home fronts and help intensify the imagery. Explicit word-choice also gives greater clarity of detail. There is a strong focus on the fears and suffering of soldiers; it is their experience he seeks to graphically portray. This is seen in the onomatopoeic ‘hoots’ of the falling gas shells described in Dulce et Decorum Est. It is preceded by the alliterative ‘knock-kneed’ description of the men who are exhausted beyond endurance.
Owen does not harangue his reader or preach his message in sermonizing tones but instead, conjures up vile and hideous images of the battlefield. These shatter any remaining shred of ignorance or complacency within the reader. His language demands sympathy and empathy with the broken figures of the common soldier. He depicts them as ‘cannon-fodder’, abused and exploited by a callous, insensitive war machine that sees soldiers as commodities rather than men. The tragic-elegiac style that is used in many of his poems, shatters any romanticized concepts of war being glorious.