An Analysis of the Wilfred Owen's and Siegfried Sassoon's War Poems Essay

In 1914 the press started to publish war poems again. During the Boer War poems had been printed to encourage recruiting or to inform the public about how the war was progressing. A lot of the early poems at the start of the First World War werent very well written. There was a lack of recruitment later on in the war and so recruitment poems started to be printed again. These were to help encourage men to sign up. Many of these poems were successful and more people signed up to fight, with the idea that war would be like a game. Towards the end of war, poets, such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, started to write poems about what the war was really like and what they had experienced when they were fighting. I am going to compare some of the recruiting poems with some of Owen and Sassoons poems. The images that many of the recruitment poems portrayed were that war was fun and that men that went to fight were making their families proud. Poets such as Harold Begbie and Matilda Betham-Edwards used a lot of images in their poems to create the feeling of guilt. These poems made people feel ashamed of not going to fight and defend their country. The poem about The Two Mothers would have made young men feel that they were letting down their families. Owen and Sassoon used much different approaches to the images in their poems. The poetry that they wrote described the horrors of war that they had experienced and the death and terrible conditions in the trenches that had failed to be mentioned to them when they signed up. These poems shocked many people because they had no idea what people at war really had to go through. I think that the poem with the most horrific images in it is Owens poem, Dulce et Decorum est. Some of the images in...