Andrew's Wiki
Anthem Doomed

Owen

• Met Siegfriend Sassoon when healing between tours of duty, which cemented his dedication to poetry, specifically war poetry
• Yeats called his stuff “all blood, dirt, & sucked sugar stick”
• But he thought he poetry was about taking away sentiment and glory of war
• Not patriotic, not sentimental
• Honest, accurate, truthful
• Not about heroes, glory, honor, majesty
• “My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.”

Anthem for Doomed Youth

• Content
  • “What passing bells for those who die as cattle?”
    • Sacred institutions don’t cut the mustard in the context of war
• Style
  • Word choices are religious (prayers, choirs, holy): sense of the spiritual has been taken away from them
  • The rhyme scheme, which is regular and soothing, seems to make up for the tone of war:
    • “The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells”
    • Though he claims consolation will come with the next generation, that it’s not possible yet, the fact that his poetry exists belies him.