The Ugliness of War in Wilfred Owens Dulce et Decorum est Essays

The Ugliness of War in Wilfred Owens Dulce et Decorum est Wilfred Owens Dulce et Decorum est is seen as a strong expression of the ugliness of war, and an attack on the humor of war being glorious (Kerr 48). It transmits an irritating clip, with full animation and in vivid colors, of embittered and battered soldiers marching to their death. It also, cogently presents a nightmarish vision of hell uploading all told its demons into the root directory of an impoverished soldier who saw one of his comrades gassed to death.The images that Owen confected with the skill of a professional craftsman remain grafted in the readers memory long after the poetry is read, echoing its sober message times and times again. The soldiers voice bitterly imploring that patriarchy stop disseminating lies about the glory and sweetness of death in defense of ones country haunts the text. The song presents this extremely tense experience articulately in 28 lines of well-confected verse. It is this confect ed eloquence and the well structured articulation of this highly lamentable experience that really betrays the poems lack of immediacy and artificiality, and makes the poet an accomplice with those he attacks as disseminators of lies. Scrutinizing Owens poem under the magnifying lens of Longinus treatise On the Sublime, and Harold Pinters view on discourse reveals that the poem perches on a detrimental fault line that destabilizes its mainstream readings.While Owen challenges patriarchy and insinuates at its responsibilities for the horror of the war, he himself maintains, to a great extent, a conventional climb up to writing poetry that does not subvert the traditional patriarchal forms of versification. The diction of the poem is delibe... ...arizes them to him to the extent that they cease to become that terrible after several perennial readings. In fact, in Owens poem the war is exhausted by its discourse the way, to borrow Jean Baudrillards expression, the eyes are exhaust ed in the gaze and the subject is exhausted in the makeup. (76)Works CitedBaudrillard, Jean. Seduction. Trans. Brian Singer. peeled York St. Martins Press, 1990.Dorsch, T. S. Classical Literary Criticism. London Penguin books, 1965.Kerr, Douglas. Wilfred Owens Voices Language and Community. Oxford Clarendon Press, 1993.Owen, Wilfred. Wilfred Owen Collected Letters. Ed. Harold Owen and John Bell. London Oxford UP, 1967.-----. Wilfred Owen The Complete Poems and Fragments. Ed. John Stallworthy. 2 vols. New York Norton, 1984.Hollis, J. R. Harold Pinter The Poetics of Silence. New York Macmillan, 1970.