Wilfred Owen and Changing Attitudes Towards the War (WWI Mini-Series)

In this episode of Beyond the Verse, the official podcast of PoemAnalysis.com and Poetry+, hosts Joe and Maiya continue their exploration of First World War poets by diving into the life and works of Wilfred Owen. They discuss his experiences as a soldier, his time recovering from shell shock at Craiglockhart War Hospital, and his mentorship under Siegfried Sassoon—key influences that shaped his raw and harrowing depictions of war. Through an analysis of his poetry, they explore how Owen rejected patriotic idealism in favor of exposing the brutal realities of the battlefield.

The episode examines Owen’s most famous works, including 'Dulce et Decorum Est' and 'Anthem for Doomed Youth,' breaking down their powerful imagery and themes of suffering, disillusionment, and the loss of innocence. Joe and Maiya contrast Owen’s stark realism with the earlier romanticized visions of war presented by poets like Rupert Brooke, emphasizing how his poetry shattered illusions about heroism and sacrifice. They also discuss Owen’s innovative use of sound, structure, and irony to convey the chaos and horror of combat.

Finally, the hosts reflect on Owen’s tragic death just days before the Armistice in 1918 and how it cemented his status as one of the most significant war poets of the 20th century. They explore his enduring impact on war literature, his influence on later poets, and the ways in which his work continues to shape our understanding of conflict, memory, and loss.

Poetry+ users can get exclusive access to analysis, content, and PDFs, including the following that relates to this episode:

• First World War Poets PDF Guide
• Wilfred Owen PDF Guide
• 'Dulce et Decorum Est': 
  • Poem PDF Guide
  • Poetry Snapshot PDF
  • Poem Printable PDF
• `Anthem for Doomed Youth':
  • Poem PDF Guide
    • Poetry Snapshot PDF
    • Poem Printable PDF

Transcript

Wilfred Owen and Changing Attitudes Towards the War (WWI Mini-Series) (Transcript)
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[00:00:00] 

Maiya: Hello and welcome to Beyond the Verse. poetry podcast brought to you by Poemanalysis.com and Poetry+. Today is the second part of our World War One Poets miniseries. You're here with me, Maiya, and my co host, Joe. If you haven't already checked out part one of our miniseries, please do go back and listen to that now. We talk about Rupert Brooke and the early years of the war.

Now you can find that on whatever you stream your podcasts on. Now, Joe, for this second part today, what are we talking

Joe: Thanks, Maiya. So we're going to be looking at Wilfred Owen, probably the most famous of the war poets that came out of the First World War, and with Wilfred Owen. we're obviously going to be talking about his life before the war, but in terms of his involvement in the First World War, we're beginning to progress through the conflict.

So Wilfred Owen doesn't actually enlist in the war until late 1915, by which time, of course, Rupert Brooke had already died. We're [00:01:00] going to be exploring the way in which Owen's poetry demonstrates changing attitudes to the first world war at home and at the front And why his poetry continues to shape our perception of war and conflict to this day so thinking about Owen before the First World War, because I think it's really important that we consider the ways in which these poets were different.

We think about the First World War as this unifying presence for all of the poets. that we're discussing in this miniseries. But actually, sometimes that misses the nuances and of course they didn't all come into the war in the same way. So of the three poets we're talking about in this series, Rupert Brooke, Owen, and Siegfried Sassoon, Owen is significantly younger.

He was only 21 years old at the outbreak of the war whereas Brooke was 27, Sassoon was 28. He was also the least experienced in literary circles. So Owen had been writing poetry for some time, hadn't made any major publications before the war, so almost all of his poetic oeuvre is First World War poetry, and that means it's fundamentally different to somebody like Brooke who had a [00:02:00] pre war literary career and to Sassoon who had a pre and a very long post war literary career.

So again, that changes the way that we in the 21st century conceive of him and his work. So going back to his early life, he was born in Shropshire in 1893 to a relatively middle class family. His family moved around a lot because his father worked, , as a railway station master. And his early literary influences were biblical, but he was also very influenced by the Romantic poets William Wordsworth and John Keats.

And actually there are lots of elements of Owen's life that have a kind of tragic arc. And one of them is that John Keats was one of his great poetic heroes. John Keats died at the age of 25, which is the same age that Owen was when he died towards the end of the First World War, and there are going to be lots of examples of kind of slightly unsettling, unnerving moments that make Owen's life all the more tragic.

So, by the time of the outbreak of the First World War, Owen was actually living in France. He was a [00:03:00] private tutor in 1913 to a family in Bordeaux. In sharp contrast to somebody like Brooke, who was desperate to join up, very patriotic from the outset, Owen was much more reticent, much more hesitant about joining the army.

And actually didn't sign up until, as I mentioned, October of 1915, and wasn't actually commissioned and sent to the front as a second lieutenant until June of 1916. So, almost half of the war had taken place before Owen arrived on the front line.

So that gives us a little bit of a sense of who this guy was before the conflict. He was very interested in literature, he was writing, but was not a known presence, was not a major name. But Maiya, what is his experience of the war and how does that influence the poetry? He goes on to write.

Maiya: Thanks, Joe. I mean, as you can imagine, Owen's experience of the war was vastly, vastly different to Rupert Brooke, who we covered in our last episode. He was actually diagnosed with shell shock, what we now know as PTSD, in [00:04:00] 1917, and he spent the summer in a war hospital called Craiglockhart in Scotland.

This is actually where he met fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon, who we will go on to talk about in our third episode of this miniseries. But tragically, as Joe mentioned, he was killed at 25 years old, just one week before Armistice, one week before the end of the war.

Prior to this, he had been awarded the military cross for service. So when we look at Owen's Life, it was one that was absolutely fraught. I think shell shock is something we absolutely touch on throughout these poems because. One of the reasons Owen has such a lasting legacy when we talk about World War I poetry is the brutality that he manages to convey in work.

And actually one poem that I'd really like to start with is the poem Anthem for Doomed Youth. Now I'm just going to read it very quickly and then Joe, I'd love to know what you think. So the poem goes as follows. What passing bells for these who die as cattle? Only the [00:05:00] monstrous anger of the guns, Only the stuttering rifles rapid rattle can patter out their hasty horizons. No mockeries now for them, No prayers, nor bells, Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells, And bugles calling for them from sad shires. What candles may be held to speed them all, not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.

The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall, their flowers the tenderness of patient minds, and each slow dusk a drawing down of blinds. So before I pass this over to you, Joe, I do want to really impress on our listeners the difference between a moment of writing and the publication of a writing. So, all of Owen's poems were written in the midst of conflict. However, the majority of them weren't published until much later. So they were published in 1919, 1920.

When you look at his poems, you're looking at a period of very, very [00:06:00] intense writing in the midst of warfare. Now, I think for anyone reading these poems, this is very evident, but the attitude that he has is one that has absolutely changed our fundamental understanding of what it is to be in trench warfare, what it is to be suffering those day to day consequences.

In our last episode, I mentioned the poem Exposure. . Many students, at least in the uk, are introduced to that poem around GCSE level when they're studying the war poems. It is one that is absolutely built into our fundamental consciousness. It is built into our understanding of what World War I warfare is. Anthem for Doomed Youth is one that I always think stands out amongst the crowd because unlike Brooke, who we talked about in our last episode, who really glorifies that process of going to war, here we see a constant aversion to what is that March towards what Brooke considered as victory and what here [00:07:00] is considered as wasteful, those who die as cattle.

The animalistic and brutal vision that we get from this poem is evident from the start. But Joe, I'd love to know where you want to start with this poem.

Joe: I think, like you've said with that opening line, the dire's cattle, I think, on the one hand, gives a sense of the wastefulness of the loss of life. The idea that these are human lives that are reduced in the eyes of Owen to no better than animals. You know, that they are slaughtered for no fit purpose.

But I think that does also chime with some of Brook's imagery. Brook's imagery, as I mentioned in the last episode, is very much drawing on that kind of a hangover, a Victorian ideal about British countryside and the field and the greenery and very much drawing on that all things bright and beautiful kind of vision of the English countryside.

This actually. He subverts that by taking a countryside scene, cattle associated with farmland, but focusing on [00:08:00] animals for slaughter. Not about beauty of nature, but about the brutality of nature. So I think that's a lovely way that Owen begins this poem. It's not a coincidence that both the stanzas in this poem begin with a rhetorical question.

Whereas Brooke enters the war from a position of certainty. a position of confidence. Owen's experience of the war is defined by uncertainty, by the removal of certainty. And actually, I think it's important to note that Owen was raised in a religious household, but had himself undergone a crisis of faith before he wrote most of these poems. His own doubts about the presence of God really are imbued within these poems. There is a sense of feeling abandoned by God.

There is a sense of feeling uncertain about the direction in which his life and the war were going. And that's so different to the poems we were looking at in our last episode with Brooke, which are confident, which are assertive, which have A kind of almost bordering on the arrogant sense of their own importance.

Owen's poetry doesn't demonstrate any of that. I think the other thing I would, I would like to focus on in [00:09:00] this poem that perhaps it's a thing we're going to come back to in Owen's poetry more generally is how vivid a soundscape he's able to create. Whereas Brooke's poetry is very much rooted in the abstract, in the images, in the ideals, so much of Owen's poetry is about sounds, is about alliteration and is about assonance.

He really immerses his reader in the vivid soundscape of the trenches. , we are there with him on the battlefield in a way, which we never were with Brooke, which of course makes sense because Brookes saw comparatively little. in the First World War itself. So, I think this poem is a great place to start, Maiya, because it really underpins, A, the way in which Owen's poetry is going to be read in contrast to Brookes, but also some of the things about his own poetry in of itself that make it distinctive.

Maiya: Absolutely, and I think the idea of what is fated is something that we should definitely touch on because in the last episode, when we talked about Brooke, we very often fell back to that sense of the godlike, the biblical, the [00:10:00] sense of purpose and fate.

But here, the title, again, is one that just Really encapsulates that, that changed attitude. Anthem for doomed youth. That sense of being doomed from the beginning. Again, being raised as cattle to slaughter. , in this poem, there is no sense that at any point, hope exists. It is completely removed from this poem.

And I love what you said about the soundscapes, because it's one of the things that makes Owen's poems. So rich in imagery. I mean, that stuttering rifles rapid rattle can patter, the way it just rolls off the tongue is absolutely incredible. And like you say, it really brings you into that very specific moment.

And I think it's very, very powerful when what Owen is trying to do is bring you to that present moment. He is trying to show you that moment of suffering. So to use sound to actually cement your place there is a really, really clever technique.

Joe: so glad you [00:11:00] mentioned the title, because, I mean, any of our regular listeners from season one or from the last episode in the miniseries will know that Maiya and I love a deep dive on a title in a poem. And the thing I love about this is that He's playing with that notion of fate with the word doomed because if something is doomed it is foretold it is destined to happen and what I love about that is it's Self fulfilling because the title focuses on the fact that youth is doomed Now that works in two ways.

If you die as a young man, your youth is doomed because you died in your youth, and yet it also applies to the soldiers who lived, because even if they live, their youth, and by youth we associate that with innocence, with vitality, with a hopeful outlook of the future, , is gone. So the beauty of this title, the genius of it, is that it is equally applicable to the young soldiers who died, or the soldiers who were young but lived.

Because even though they lived, it is their youth that is doomed to die. Because there is no way that an innocent, idealistic, [00:12:00] hopeful worldview could survive these battlefields, even if the physical body did.

Maiya: a hundred percent. And actually, one of the lines that I think is so often overlooked in this poem regards the bugle. So for listeners who aren't aware, a bugle is a small sort of trumpet that is often used for military calls.

However, the distance here is one that always sits at odds with me because here, bugles call for them from Sad Shires. The bugles, in this case, located in England, back home, I think, again, this is Owen almost critiquing the sort of propaganda of war. The call is coming from home, but by the time those young men, the soldiers arrive on the battlefield, they are so far removed from what is correct and safe that It just creates distance, so, know, when we talk about the soundscape, not only is Owen playing with the very immediate present, but he's also playing with that sense of distance from home, [00:13:00] because so many of these young soldiers never came

Joe: I think that's brilliant and I think the other thing I love about that is it, it offers a hint about some of the critique of military authority that are going to go on to define Owen's poetry because the trumpet is symbolic not only of the kind of pomp and grandeur of military ceremony, you know, we still play the trumpet on Armistice Day. 

But, of course, the trumpet and musical instruments also serve a really practical purpose historically in warfare.

Trumpets were used to signal that the attack was going to begin, that soldiers had to go over the top in the trenches. Now, The emphasis on the physical distance between the soldiers in the Western Front in France and Belgium and the sound of those trumpets back in the shires, for me, is a metaphor to expose the gap between the reality of the conflict for the individual soldiers at the front and the experience of military leadership, who are often miles behind the front lines, and of course the political leadership, which is in a different country altogether.

Maiya: I mean, the sense of doubling [00:14:00] in this poem is just really technically capable. I really think that Owen's poems have stood the test of time for this very reason. I'm looking particularly at these final two lines that close the poem. flowers, the tenderness of patient minds, and each slow dusk a drawing down of blinds.

Now, in many ways, this can come across as a slightly abstract idea. The flowers, the sort of natural elements, the slow dusk. But what I see here is the patient minds. Let's not forget that Owen himself was hospitalized and diagnosed with shell shock. He was a patient. He is someone that was around people who experienced hospital and experienced it himself.

So when I see a patient mind and the drawing down of blinds , he really visualizes, you know, the thousands and thousands of soldiers who were laid up in hospital beds, Wounded Beyond Repair, who was suffering PTSD, suffering shell shock, suffering these awful things. And [00:15:00] when we talk about a drawing down of blinds, the darkness that he creates at the close of this poem is just, you can't mitigate it. It really speaks to this sense of absolute loss of hope. glimmers are paired with goodbyes in this poem. every time Owen offers you a hint of positivity, he manages to cut it down so successfully. The choirs that turn out to be the shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells. You are constantly reminded that wartime is inescapable.

Joe: You're absolutely right, he undercuts every hint of positivity. With a grim dose of reality I think those lines about the choir are some that I would really like to focus in on because they offer us A really interesting insight into his poetry, but also his process So just to read those lines again, nor any voice of mourning save the choirs the shrill Demented choirs of wailing shells and that second line i've read in particular.

I [00:16:00] think is Utterly haunting. It's completely nightmarish. And I don't just mean nightmarish in terms of our understanding of it. I mean, literally, we know that Owen drew upon his nightmares. His recurring dreams of this conflict. In many ways, you know, he's a surrealist before his time.

He's writing down his unconscious memories of these things. And he was really encouraged to do this by Siegfried Sassoon. Maiya and I are going to get onto this later in the episode. But The period of time that Sassoon and Owen spent together at Craig Lockhart Hospital in Edinburgh is vital if you're going to understand Owen as a poet.

Sassoon was a hero of his and when they met they formed an instant connection and Sassoon was beginning to be influenced by Freudian ideas, by psychoanalysis, in particular about the importance of dreams. Now, when you pair that interest in dreams, that interest in nightmares that Sassoon brought to Owen, coupled with the fact that Owen was experiencing these vivid [00:17:00] nightmares, he was suffering from PTSD as Maiya mentioned, it casts poems like this in a completely different light.

Because a line like that, a line that reads, The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells, does feel as though it's been lifted straight out of your worst nightmare. And actually, in Owen's case, it may well have been.

Maiya: and When we talk about the relationship between Owen and Sassoon, it's really not very often that we have the opportunity to say, oh yes, this poet was directly influenced by this other poet, you know. We talk a lot about certain schools, certain literary movements, certain rooms that people may have been in, but This is a relationship that impacts each other's poetry, the rest of Sassoon's life.

As we've discussed, Owen died , one week before the end of this war. His literary journey is completely encapsulated by the trauma and the tragedy of World War I. So when we Sassoon may [00:18:00] have influenced him, it's really important to note that What we read from his poetry and what we take from it was absolutely immediate to the time.

It wasn't a reflection, it wasn't hindsight. As Joe mentioned, it feels as if it's lifted straight from a nightmare because it was. Whether asleep or awake, he was constantly haunted by these things. And I think that sense of haunting is one that absolutely draws through all of his work. 

Joe: So I'd just like to pay a little bit more attention to these months that Sassoon and Owen spent together in Edinburgh because I think it's, I think it's vital to understanding both poets. Now, Maiya and I have talked, you know, in this episode and our previous episode, about the utility of these kind of terms, World War One poets, just as we talk about, you know, how useful is it to think of romantic poets as a literary movement when oftentimes these people didn't meet or were vastly different in age or vastly different in outlook.

I mean, Lord Byron is not very similar to William Wordsworth, et cetera, et cetera. The First World War is not [00:19:00] one thing. It is not singular, it is not consistent, and people's experience of it was not consistent. We think of it as being one long trench battle, which is of course accurate in one sense, but not every trench was as violent as every trench, and not every front of the war was as bloody, and people like Brooke, of course, never saw trench warfare.

So, in of itself, thinking of these people as only First World War poets is not always helpful. There are moments, however, where we can, as Maiya said, genuinely pin down individuals to individual places and specific conversations they had about each other's work. We know that Owen and Sassoon spent several months together in the summer of 1917.

We also know where it was, and this is crucial to understanding the poetry, it is removed from the immediate realities of war. They are in Edinburgh. They are miles and miles away. There is no blitz. There's no bombing. They are in a moment of safety. The space that that allowed them from the immediacy of the violence, I think is one of [00:20:00] the reasons that Owen's poems Feel so mature feel so fully formed I think that that period in which we know he was editing his own work But we know that Sassoon was editing his work There are copies of manuscripts of Owen's poetry with Sassoon's annotations.

They they had an incredibly close Literary connection, but also a personal one. And just to give sort of a sense of that and the importance of it to Owen, he wrote a letter back to Sassoon after he'd left the hospital in which he said, You have fixed my life, however short. Which is not only a beautiful thing to say to another person that really gives weight to the strength of their bond, but also, of course, as with so Owen's life, foreshadows the tragedy to come, however short.

Because we, of course, know in retrospect that After leaving Craiglockhart Hospital in the autumn of 1917, Owen had about a year to live. And as we mentioned earlier, he was just 25 years old when he died. And we'll never know really [00:21:00] what kind of a poet he would have gone on to be post war, but the fact that his entire poetic canon is related to this brief, intense two years that he spent at the front, and of course with a brief interlude at the hospital, means that he is forever enshrined in a moment in time.

Sassoon goes on to write other things post war. Brooke, as we mentioned, wrote things pre war. Owen, in many ways, is the First World War poet. He lives and dies in this conflict. He writes all of his major work about or in this conflict. And I think that that contributes to the way in which he's remembered and the reason that he is regarded, perhaps, as the greatest or certainly the most iconic of these poets. Perhaps the most heartbreaking of all is that as Maiya mentioned He died just one week almost to the hour before the end of the First World War But his mother only received news of his death on the day of Armistice itself So on the day in which the whole country was celebrating the end of the war Owen's mother received news that her son was never coming home.

[00:22:00] I mean, normally we would call it kind of poetic justice, but there is almost a poetic injustice to the biographical events of Owen's life, right down to the hours and the dates at which the moments occurred. And it's hard to think of another writer that is as associated with a specific moment in time, throughout human history, as Owen is with this conflict.

Maiya: So wherever you are on your poetic journey, a Poetry+ subscription will give you access to a whole wealth of information on our site, thousands of printable poem PDFs, an extensive learning library, a weekly newsletter, and exclusive access to Ask Joe and I, questions to be featured in upcoming Q and A episodes of Beyond the Verse.

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[00:23:00] 

Maiya: So before the break, we touched on Anthem for Doomed Youth, one of Owen's most famous poems . There are, however, many, many more we could talk about, and one I'd really like to move on to is a poem called Strange Meeting . And the reason I want to look at this poem is because it really sits in contrast to Rupert Brooke's poems that we were looking at in our last episode. We actually explore what is effectively a conversation a current soldier and a spectre, a ghost, a dead man. And it is one of the most impactful poems of Owens, I think, that is really overlooked when it comes to the conversation about death and dying.

Now I'm going to ask Joe, would you kindly read the first two stanzas for us?

Joe: It seemed that out of battle I escaped down some profound, dull tunnel, long since scooped through granites which titanic wars had groined . Yet also their encumbered sleepers groaned, too [00:24:00] fast in thought or death to be bestirred. Then, as I probed them, one sprang up and stared with piteous recognition in fixed eyes.

Lifting distressful hands as if to bless and by his smile I knew that sullen hall by his dead smile. I knew we stood in hell.

Maiya: Thank you, Joe. Now, This poem, I think from your reading, any listener will be able to tell that the tone of it is so sullen and quiet. And I really love how it stands in contrast to certain of Brooke's poems, like The Soldier , because in The Soldier, we obviously explored this very pastoral notion of an English heaven. Here, there is an absolute certainty , from the speaker that they are in hell.

There is no questioning as to where he is. . Despite many of Owen's poems actually exploring the uncertainty of wartime, the failure, the death [00:25:00] that accompanies You know, long, long stretches of war. Here, the certainty isn't necessarily about the war itself.

It's about what they find at that moment of death. Obviously, it's a very interesting choice to have a conversation between what is originally presumed to be a living speaker, but actually is him at this moment of death. But the one thing I want to focus on is actually a technical choice made by Owen, which is these mismatched Slightly slant rhymes that don't quite align, that really creates a sense of disruption. From Joe's reading, you'll have been able to hear, groined, groaned, bestirred, stared, later on in the poem we move on to grained, ground, moan and mourn. All of these lines are kind of flooding into one another in this sort of underground landscape, this hell that Owen has created. And what I think is so fascinating about the way that Owen constructs this poem is that sense of [00:26:00] dislocation. Because hell is seen to be the literal caverns underneath the trenches. It is almost the trenches themselves. It is palatable. You could touch it. Out of that battle, I escaped down some profound, dull tunnel. This sense of escape is paired with the absolute misery that the escape is death. And that creates this awful sense of certainty because there is no moving forward past this. There is no more to be done. And, I mean, Joe, I'd love to know what you think about that kind of heaviness that accompanies this poem. But I just think it's one that is really overlooked and completely unmissable when you actually look at the content of it.

Joe: I could not agree more I think it's one of Owen's very very best and I'm always shocked that it's not given greater prominence in the education system You know that Maiya and I have been through for example in the UK. There's a couple of things I just want to touch on that demonstrate how nuanced and how [00:27:00] impressive Owen's rendering of this poem is, first of all, it is a somewhat cliche to say that a place is hell.

You know, it's hell on earth, it's hellish in here, all that stuff. Owen's subtle subversion of that makes it all the more fresh because actually, the line that begins the poem is, I had escaped. So actually, the place we then learn he's escaped to is hell. Now, the brilliance of that is that he's saying, I'm not saying that the trenches are hell necessarily, I'm saying that hell would be an improvement.

And that very brief sort of reframing of the traditional cliche that this battleground, is hell, I think makes it all the more fresh. The second thing I want to touch upon is that this poem kind of calls back to a relatively Played out trope in classical literature about going to the underworld that notion of the tunnel I mean, for example in Homer's Odyssey Odysseus briefly goes to the underworld to meet the ghosts of [00:28:00] the soldiers he fought with and against he meets the ghost of Achilles for example, and that notion that there is some kind of wisdom to be gleaned from going down to see your deceased former Allies and adversaries what I love about this poem is that We don't have that sense that the speaker is returning to the earth with that newfound wisdom, with that newfound appreciation.

If anything, we get the sense that it is only a matter of time before they Joein the deceased person in the underworld. And I find Owen's ability to foreshadow the fact that the only likely outcome of this conflict is more souls in the underworld, more souls in hell. to be this utterly haunting and really memorable way of looking at the poem.

There is none of the heaven that we talked about in our first episode, you know, the soldier ending with this line about an English heaven. There's no sense of heaven at all, let alone one that aligns with a particular nation. There is one outcome, [00:29:00] it seems, for this war, and it is hell and it is death.

There is no sense whatsoever that the speaker in this poem has learned anything that is going to help him avoid that same fate as the person he's talking to.

Maiya: It's actually one of the things we touched on in our prior episode, which is how general attitudes change to believe in the futility of war. Unlike with World War II, where there was a common enemy, where there was a fight against something. The sense of and scale of loss in this war. Is really, I think, encapsulated by those closing lines of this poem, which are directly lifted from the dead man's mouth.

Who we then find out was actually one of the enemy. And it goes, I am the enemy you killed, my friend. I knew you in this dark. For so you frowned yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed. I parried, but my hands were loath and cold. Let us sleep now. And it's very rare [00:30:00] to see any sort of sympathy towards an enemy. You certainly wouldn't see that from a World War II poem, for example. But the fact that here, Owen is still able to find that sympathy for the enemy, he recognizes the absolute futility of this battle for both sides, because the losses. Was so enormous that when it comes down to a single soldier versus another single soldier, when you are looking at conscription and young men who were forced to fight or felt a sense of duty, this isn't a war between individuals. This was a war that was scaled up to such a size individuals, had no other choice.

And I think choice is something that Owen feels stripped of in this poem, and it, and it absolutely comes through in the way that his speaker. of discusses what war means to him,

Joe: I think that's one of the things that really makes Owen's poetry different to that which came before, especially Brooke, as we talked about in the last episode, because I [00:31:00] mentioned in the last episode that Brooke is not writing about individuals.

He's not writing about himself or any other specific individual. He's writing about archetypes and he's writing about representations. Owen does the opposite. Owen focuses on the individual. This voice at the end of the poem that Maiya's read is a man that was killed by another man. He says you stabbed me and that focus on the individual act of killing , the individual act of coming to terms with that killing, makes Owen's poetry all the more haunting because it's not to say that we as readers can't extrapolate symbolic meanings, and of course we might think that this is representative of a much broader conflict, but the focus on individual suffering, the focus on individual guilt and trauma is one of the things that makes Owen's poetry so iconic.

And, you know, it's, it's worth saying at this stage that Owen's worldview when it comes to war is far more instrumental in the way we think about war in 2025 than anything Brookeever wrote. You know, [00:32:00] most of our conception of war, certainly let's say in the Western world, is shaped by the kind of worldview that Owen is expressing here.

That sense that it leaves the world in a worse place than when it found it. It leaves people broken and suffering and in pain. Real people in pain. When we conceive of war, when we argue the case for and against war in parliaments around the world, that's the worldview that we're expressing.

There is very little of that residual pre first world war outlook on the world that survives beyond this point.

Maiya: You're absolutely right and you know, one of the things I, I don't want listeners to forget here is that what is really truly harrowing, especially about Owen's poetry. is that he was 25 or younger when these were written. He was still a young man , who had not even reached the prime of his life.

He was still a few years out of being a child. So, to see naivety [00:33:00] completely dissipate, completely gone from this lens, , is, like I say, really harrowing. I think about a lot of Owen's poems, and I think, you know, we'll touch on, on Dulce et Decorum Est, which is objectively his most famous poem that discusses, you know, whether it is right and proper to die for your country, how that's a lie. And one of the things that Owen does so successfully is unpack that sense of youth in war, because, you know, as you've said previously, Joe, were young men being sent out to fight, and they weren't trained. They were going out of a sense of duty. And there's a few lines in Dulce et Decorum Est that always stand out to me as being clumsy. And it sounds silly to say when we talk about someone who is a very talented poet, but the way that he portrays clumsiness, is really clever, read the stanza briefly, but it goes, gas. gas quick boys an ecstasy of fumbling fitting the clumsy helmets just [00:34:00] in time but someone still was yelling out and stumbling and floundering 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. This is an unrelenting portrayal of what it was like to be in the trenches. These are, as I said previously, young, untrained men. These are not killing machines. And I think that sense of clumsiness is what makes it so harrowing, because you're sat there understanding that this all could be avoided.

This is, Accidental in so many ways that so many deaths occurred just as a result of, like Owen says, a clumsy helmet, know, a fumbling, someone tripped and got caught in a gas that they weren't supposed to be in. This is all leading up to Owen's ultimate summary that [00:35:00] fighting in a world war for a country, for an ideal that is outdated, is One of the most overt criticisms of the wartime propaganda that I, I think I've seen in, in years.

Joe: I think the poem is a wonderful example of this notion of what we call anecdotal value. For those listeners who aren't aware, anecdotal value is an idea across sociology, anthropology, psychology, which basically means that the way in which we are able to understand cultural, social, or economic phenomenons is through anecdotes or anecdotal evidence, so not necessarily statistics information.

We are not perfectly rational beings as humans, and even though we should be as moved by the information as by an individual story that might represent that information, that's not the case. Now, what Owen is able to do is translate the scale of the suffering by mediating it through individuals. And that's the great skill.

There's a quote which really illustrates this point, which is [00:36:00] often wrongly attributed to Joseph Stalin. And the quote is, One man's death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. And that brilliantly captures the way in which when we are given numbers that we can't really comprehend of, it's impossible to comprehend of what a million people dead means, because I for one can't even picture what a million people alive would look like.

. So by mediating the scale of suffering through the individual lives of this soldier or that soldier, and focusing on their personal suffering, Owen is actually able to embody All of the suffering of the millions of soldiers, but unlike Brooke, who does the other way around, who takes individual circumstances and extrapolates them to make universal conclusions, Owen is able to take universal suffering and focus it and funnel it through individual soldiers.

And I think it's impossible for us to conceive of. subsequent portrayals of war and indeed this war without seeing how Owen is able to do that. And I think, you know, for example, [00:37:00] the famous novelist Sebastian Fawkes, whose most famous novel, Birdsong, is about this very He uses a wonderful technique in that novel of alternating between a wide view of the battlefield in which you get a sense of the scare of the suffering before using a technique known as third person focalizer to almost embody the viewpoint of an individual within that scene.

And that ability to zoom in and out does both. I don't think you can conceive of a novel that does that without Owen's poetry, without that immersive On the ground, in the dirt, amongst the smells and the sounds, reality, that his poetry portrays.

Maiya: that sense of the individual, especially in this poem, is one that sits so heavy on your personal conscience, you know, I think about what I studied at school , and when we touched on World War I history, I'm thinking about, you know, mustard gas, for example. Yes, as a person at home who isn't involved in the direct [00:38:00] trenches, you understand that, okay, this is a chemical tool that will cause the deaths of the enemy. It's, it's very much. Understood as a kind of broad brushstroke as to what it actually is. But I mean, God, Owen's description here is so vivid and so brutal that it's absolutely impossible to glorify it. And I think that is where this sort of huge change comes in because you move from what is effectively, A victorious propaganda focusing on every small victory to something that You actually see the horror and the impact of it , on single people.

I mean, I'll just read the line, but, 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 [00:39:00] corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud, Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues. I mean, I hardly need to analyse that to demonstrate the impact, but I think what is different here, especially when we compare to Brooke’s poetry, is there's a direct address. If you could pace behind the wagon, if you could hear, he almost interrogates the reader, he interrogates the listener, and in some ways it can be read as a criticism, as you're not here, so you don't get to decide. What this means. You don't get to decide what constitutes as right, and what constitutes as proper, and how you market the war. This is a voice that is quite literally entrenched in World War I. When you see a vivid description like that of just an anonymous body, he could have given a name to this person, but what he does instead is show [00:40:00] that this could be anyone. And I think that is ultimately the most powerful thing he can do in this poem, is that direct address.

Joe: I've always interpreted that direct address, I think, and this is something we can explore elsewhere in this poem, as pointed at the decision makers. That notion that I'm fighting, I'm dying, I get to have some kind of say on what that looks like. And I think that the title is crucial in this because, and as Maiya mentioned, the poem ends with that line, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, which Owen refers to as the old lie. Now I think there's a lot of stuff to unpack here.

So as Maiya said, Earlier on that line is broadly translated along the lines of it is a right and honorable thing or it is right and just it Is right and proper to die for one's country It is a quote taken from the ancient Roman poet Horace and I'm going to come to Horace in just a moment but Before I go back to ancient Rome as listeners of the podcast will know that I am Always looking for an opportunity to do.

I think it's worth noting that Dulce et Decorum [00:41:00] Est that line was actually imprinted on the chapel at Sandhurst. Sandhurst is the military academy in Britain that trains army officers to this day.

Incredibly famous, incredibly iconic as this kind of symbol of the British army. So when he then calls that a lie, and we know that that is imprinted on the chapel at Sandhurst, he is pointing his finger at the military elite, not at the enemy. There's a lot more vitriol in Owen's poetry towards 

his 

own side, particularly the sort of officer class, the higher officers than there is towards any enemy.

As we saw in the last poem that we were talking about when he meets. deceased person he's killed, they refer to each other as friends. There is no sense that Owen looks at his own military leadership with friendship. In fact, he looks at them with disgust and with disdain because he feels they've lied to him.

Now, on the Horace point, Horace was an ancient Roman poet. More than two millennia ago.

The significance of that, and by calling it the Old Lie, is that [00:42:00] Owen is throwing a single blanket over all of that period of history, those 2, 000 years between Horace and the First World War, and he's identifying it almost as a single thing. And he's saying, that is the Old World, and this is the New World.

That world was defined by the Old Lie, and this is the New World, which is defined by the new reality, this new, brutal, bloody, violent reality that Owen was experiencing. And I think that's really important for two reasons. One, because it gives us a sense that Owen knew How important this war was going to be.

And maybe that seems obvious to us in the 21st century because we know how important it was. But the presence of mind to know during the conflict that the world had changed, I think goes some way , to showing us, , how important and how intelligent and how perceptive a poet Owen was but also about how grim this reality was, that people on the ground knew that the world was different.

It could never go back to the way it was. And the other reason I think that that's [00:43:00] important is because it chimes with Other poems that Maiya and I have talked about on the podcast recently and the last series about this period of time You know Maiya and I did a Rudyard Kipling poem if in season one which if listeners haven't listened to yet I suggest you go and check it out that kind of late Victorian outlook on the world that idea that the world is fundamentally a good and green and pleasant place in which goodness is rewarded and bravery and honesty are rewarded.

We've also done the William Butler Yates poem, The Second Coming, which is a post First World War poem in which the world is a dark and morally obscure and uncertain place. So already in those three poems, this one, If, and the second coming, you get that sense of a before and after. It's one thing for poets literally before and after to be aware of that, but Owen is in the midst of this, and yet he has the presence of mind to know that the world was fundamentally changed.

That Horace, up till now, is the old world, and that the new world, [00:44:00] post war, would be forever different.

Maiya: Joe is absolutely right. We can't overstate the importance of Owen's poetry at the moment that it was published and received by the public, you know. As Joe said throughout this podcast episode, the way in which we view modern warfare is absolutely down to that school of thought, the individual sense of suffering that Owen portrayed , in a vast amount of his poems. We've only had a chance to touch on a few of them today, but please go to Poemanalysis.com, explore some of his other poems. The imagery he uses is so vivid. Again, as Joe was talking about those soundscapes, really immerse yourself in his work because, you know, I think even as a young person in school, if you're encountering these for the first time, it is a body of work that will change you. So I would , massively recommend to any listeners out there to go and explore some more. What I'm really interested in is our next episode coming up, which we will talk [00:45:00] about Sassoon's impact on Owen's poetry, Sassoon's poetry himself, and actually the fact that Sassoon lived until he was over 80 years old.

He is someone who offers a post war Now, Joe and I are going to talk about how that changes our perception in the next episode, but for now, it's goodbye from me.

Joe: And goodbye from me and the team at poemanalysis.com and Poetry+