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  • Essay / The Theme of Anger in Wilfred Owen's Poems

    Wilfred Owen, a war poet, uses a large number of linguistic and structural devices throughout his poems in order to express his anger at war. In this essay, I will focus on three of his works: "Anthem for Doomed Youth", "Dulce et Decorum Est" and "Mental Cases" to analyze and compare the effects and intentions of his writings and how these express anger. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essayWilfred Owen uses irony extensively to express anger in his poems. This is very important when Owen discusses the power of guns, since he refers to the "monstrous wrath of guns" in "Anthem for Doomed Youth". The personification of guns creates a distinctly ironic tone, which continues in his other poems. Such personification also highlights the disastrous effects of firearms and, indeed, Owen's opposition to such murderous capability – emphasizing his anger towards war by demonstrating its futile nature. In the same poem, Owen had already referred to the soldiers as "cattle." This dehumanization, juxtaposed with personification, intensifies Owen's use of irony and demonstrates his anger toward war by revealing the power that weapons held over soldiers, implying that men were inferior to metal. Owen maintains this ironic tone in his poem "Mental Cases" when he describes "the men whose minds the dead have ravished." Here, just as in "Anthem for Doomed Youth", Owen again uses personification to express his anger at the war. He humanizes “the dead” in order to emphasize how powerless men were. The irony here implies that men were more effective from the grave than on the battlefield; once again, Owen's intention was to demonstrate the futility of war. This concept, along with the idea that guns had more influence than men, strongly juxtaposes the way soldiers were represented by recruiting propaganda and therefore perceived by the general public during the First World War. This further demonstrates Owen's anger as he indirectly expresses the negligent manner in which the soldiers were treated. Indeed, Owen abundantly expresses his anger against war by trivializing it, comparing it to a game. In "Dulce et Decorum Est", he illustrates "the just-in-time adjustment of clumsy helmets", the choice of lexicon "just in time" suggesting that, for many, war was just a game. This reflects the view of many wartime generals, who made countless decisions without ever paying the price. Here, Owen's intention was to express his anger towards his superiors during the war, through the use of metaphor and demonstrate how they neglected the lives of so many soldiers. Similarly, Owen continues this harsh comparison in "Mental Cases" by describing the soldiers "kicking us who brought war and madness upon them", again giving a connotation of play. Owen expresses his anger at to war, implying that during this period his superiors were willing to gamble with lives to achieve victory. Here, Owen's effective use of animal imagery with the lexicon "paw", creates an anguished tone and continues Owen's intention of demonstrating how the soldiers were mistreated, describing that they were regarded with such of respect than a simple animal and that they considered them disposable and disposable. also replaceable. By comparing soldiers to animals, the effective use of dehumanization demonstrates.