ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -Writing from the perspective of his intense personal experience of the front line, his poems, including ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ and ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, bring to life the physical and mental trauma of combat. Owen’s aim was to tell the truth about what he called ‘the pity of War’.

Detailed explanation-2: -In 1915 Owen enlisted in the British army. The experience of trench warfare brought him to rapid maturity; the poems written after January 1917 are full of anger at war’s brutality, an elegiac pity for “those who die as cattle, ” and a rare descriptive power. In June 1917 he was wounded and sent home.

Detailed explanation-3: -His best known poems include “Anthem for Doomed Youth", “Futility", “Dulce Et Decorum Est", “The Parable of the Old Men and the Young” and “Strange Meeting".

Detailed explanation-4: -Although Wilfred Owen, an avid reader, wrote poetry before he enlisted as a soldier in 1915, his most prolific time was between 1916 and 1918. Suffering from shell-shock in 1917, Owen was admitted to a hospital in Edinburgh, where he met fellow poet and soldier Siegfried Sassoon.