Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owens poetry illustrates the extraordinary experiences of youth at war. Owens main concern is to portray the brutality of war, the waste of youth at war and the futile nature of war. He effectively conveys these ideas through his poetical techniques of visual and aural imagery, structure and figurative language. Anthem for doomed youth and Futility are two poems which effectively represent the suffering and pity these young men experienced in war.
Owen uses sense imagery, specifically sounds to draw the reader into the setting that is established in the opening four lines of Anthem for Doomed Youth. This allows the reader to engage with the setting, to see and hear the death and destruction that Owen witnesses and constructs in the poem.
The title of his poem “Anthem for Doomed Youth” gives the first impression of what the poem is about. It is a lament for the young men who were called to die unnecessarily in war. The poet criticizes the pointlessness of the war that only caused the death of millions of young men. The following paragraphs show how the poet uses figurative language to express his anger and sadness that arise as a result of the disrespect for the soldiers who died on the battlefield. The author uses literary tools like simile, imagery, irony, alliteration, metaphor, personification and onomatopoeia to convey the theme of the poem.
Anthem for doomed youth is set out as a sonnet, this is needed for the development of the ideas Owen what’s to raise; the octet builds a hellish picture, with angry comparisons to the church and the battlefield. The sestet continues the parallels between the church and the battle field but shifts the emphasis from Owens anger to the sincerity of the responses, by the soldiers and the girls to death.
The first verse expresses the author’s anger against the war and talks about
the environment in which the soldiers died. Owen opens his stanza with a
rhetorical question to engage the reader. He wants to let the...