It is perhaps more comfortable for modern readers to place this poem in the context of what came after it, even in some scholars’ opinions, because of it. However, while the budding disenchantment with Victorian ideals would eventually lead to modernism, it is equally useful to look back and attempt to place “Dolce et Decorum Est” in an ancient context. “So compelling is the grim imagery and dramatic incident of “Dolce Et Decorum Est” that it is difficult reading in reading it to cut the poem off from the terrible world it paints…the more obvious of the signals is the ironic inversion of the line from Horace. The Horacian echo provides Owen with his title and is the concluding point toward which the structural irony of the poem moves. Without it he is left with his horrific war imagery, which is point enough; with it he makes an additional point about the impotence of poetic tradition to speak truthfully of war”  (Griffith 37).

Aside from the direct reference to Horace in “Dolce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen in using the title penned by the Greek writer, it is interesting to note that the themes Owen plays off of, most notably the Greek idea that war was epic and heroic—a worthy quest for any man, are the ideas Owen completely rejects. There is little about the image of a man dying a slow, painful death, completely helpless that is romantic or heroic and in fact, much of Owen’s poem is anti-heroic since there are no heroes. There are only men and these are men that no longer seemed concerned with the eventual spoils of conquest or the glory of fighting in battle, they are merely concerned with basic survival. It is useful to view this poem as a turning point in literature since it uses the Greek writers and their stories of epic battles by incorporating their language and slogans, yet at the same time he denies the validity of this classical canon and wishes, as noted above, to “rebuke the fathers that wooed him” and the rest of his generation that were mislead by notions of grandeur.

While the discussion thus far has centered on this poem in a very large context historically, it is equally useful to narrow in very closely on the poet himself and his experiences with the disillusionment that is expressed so succinctly in this work since it is likely to represent the feelings of a great number of men during the Great War. Just as background information, Owen died quite young in battle late in 1918 not long after penning “Dolce et Decorum Est” and although he obviously had misgivings about war itself later in his military experience, he was, presumably like other young men, was excited at the prospect of the war and was prone to their fancies about the glory of war that he later came to reject so vehemently. Before his swift transition after facing the horrors of war to being a mere general away from the front lines, Owen was “struck by the difference between the grotesque reality of the war zone and the appallingly inaccurate depictions of the war at home. These sentiments, together with supportive vivid details, were relayed home regularly. Still, he took comfort in his devotion to duty and in writing, criticizing, and discussing poetry, pleasures which he never neglected” (Lane 111). It is clear to see how Owen, a gentleman of the “old order” in many ways because of his background and education could, at least for a time (before he was diagnosed with shell-shock in 1917) still engage in literary and more aristocratic pursuits while being able to sideline the war mentally. While it cannot be proven directly, it can be fairly assumed that Owen was very much like other men of the upper-middle class that became involved in the war. While he would later come to criticize the institutions he was so heavily influenced by, it wasn’t until the final and most gruesome stages of the war that he was finally able to shed these notions of civility and realize that perhaps the human race is not quite as pretty a picture as the era he was born has told him.

The best evidence for Owen’s early romanticizing of war is expressed in one of his unfinished ballads that was not published until the mid-1920s, some years after his death. It was written in 1914, well before he had an direct knowledge of warfare beyond what history and literature could reveal.  Notice the sharp contrast in tone, imagery, and style with “Dolce” when he begins  “O meet it is and passing sweet / To live in peace with others, / But sweeter still and far more meet / To die in war for brothers” (Owen 1914). This “sugary” take on war is highly ironic. Owen uses words such as “sweeter” and “peace” and when death is mentioned, it is not something grisly, but rather they die as brothers. These few lines of this unfortunately unfinished poem are reversed completely four years later when Owen writes “Dolce et Decorum Est” and the images and words are filled violence and death. “If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood / Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, / Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud / of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues” (Owen 1918). The difference could not be more marked in all literary aspects. The author has gone from a world that is “sweet” to one that is not “obscene as cancer” and more like a nightmare than a reality. In many senses though, one might be able to suggest that in this period of history, finding out what reality was an all or nothing proposition. Considering that the Victorian and Romantic ages cast a rosy light on even the most trivial of unpleasant aspects of life, is it any more realistic for Owen to so submerge himself in this nightmare world that there is no longer an identifiable reality? One could easily guess that this type of perplexing question was exactly the kind that typified early modernist thought. The question would eventually become how an artist was supposed to represent a reality when the one they had known so well (Victorian) had been exposed as a sham.

Some critics have pointed out that there is even more of a historical message to “Dolce Decorum Est” than initially meets the eye. Consider for example the line, “If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace / Behind the wagon that we flung him in.” Here the reader is not an innocent bystander—witnessing the horror from a cozy armchair. By inserting the personal pronoun, “you” he forces his readers to take stock of their position in the war and tries to cause them to see through his eyes. “After the end of the opening sonnet section, Owen introduces the second person pronoun and the poem turns from a description into an accusation. If you could see the realities of war, you would not promulgate the ideology that allows this to go on. By extension, you bear the responsibility for the passive suffering from the “vile incurable sores” on this “innocent tongue.” And the officer poet is going to make you quite aware of this predicament that you have gotten yourself into” (Campbell 210).  “Dulce et Decorum Est” allows Owen to describe trench life at its least heroic. Tired and dirty troops slog away from the front line when they are attacked by gas shells. The meticulously realized death of one of the soldiers, complete with “blood gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs” leads to the “angry conclusion in which civilians are blamed for holding unrealistic assumptions about the war while the Latin tag, a popular gravestone motto for the war dead, is twisted for all the irony it can muster. It is this kind of situational irony of which mainstream war criticism strongly approves” (Campbell 211). This is yet another reason why this poem stands in its historical context. While poetry from the Romantic ad Victorian periods before it was aimed to achieve more simple goals; describing a beautiful women, expressing religious devotion, or detailing the wonders of nature, the purpose was different than Owen’s. In this poetry from before the war, the reader was simply allowed to sit back and enjoy pleasant imaginings. In this sense then the reader was removed from the action of the poem, there were not references made to them personally. In “Dolce et Decorum Est” this idea is cast aside and Owen tries to personally involve the reader and makes them an active part of the images they witness.

This could be considered as more political than poetic but there is the positive idea behind this poem; that poetry does not have to be insipid and purposeless—it can have a goal and can sweep the reader into making changes. “Certainly, this is a memorable poem, remarkable for its graphic description of the agonies of a first World War gas victim and widely anthologized no doubt for this very reason: its subject and even more its treatment of that subject seem so decidedly “unpoetic” that the poem serves a double didactic purpose, at once to condemn war and to convince readers (especially young readers of school textbooks) that not all poetry is boring or saccharine” (Cyr 65). While this is perhaps putting a more modern spin on what has already been suggested here, it’s interesting to note that not only did Owen influences readers of his generation, but those to come along later b showing that poetry was not, as it was in the Victorian and Romantic eras, all about love, courtship, and religion. Owen shows that “poetry can encourage real emotions and make us less susceptible to sentimental ones. From the point of view of the poet, what is at stake here is the difference between an accurate representation of the past and a revisionist history which alters one’s own emotional memories in order to ignore whatever does not arouse feelings of sweet tender sentimentality” (Furtak 208).

Overall, the importance of the Victorian sentiments combined with centuries of literature devoted to the romanticized and epic accounts of war attributed with the strong sense of disillusionment felt by many soldiers during and after World War I. For the first time in history, at least publicly, war was not a grandiose adventure—it was rather a horrible measure taken to prevent unfortunate events from occurring on the world’s stage. While one could argue for days about the historical events of the Great War, the feeling still remains among scholars that this was the beginning of the end of romantic ideals about the nature of war. Moreover, one critic suggests that the biographical nature of this poetry allows for a greater approachability of this poem. “Mainstream criticism of First World War poetry has been primarily biographical in approach. Such an approach has tended to result in a criticism that implicitly (or occasionally explicitly) argues for its subject. In other words, war poetry criticism has not so much read its subject in a critical manner as it has presented various apologies for its subject, that subject being both the war poem and the war poet.

 Like Owen going back to the trenches to make an effective protest on the behalf of their men, war poetry critics have protested the sufferings of their subjects” (Campbell 207). While this is a useful way at looking at “Dolce et Decorum Est for modern readers and scholars, one must also understand how this might have been read by the late-Victorians who had their entire worldview shattered in a short period of the four years between 1914-1917. By making a personal and unashamedly biographical appeal through his series of grotesque images of war, Owen was able to influence the minds of his readers even more clearly. Again, the poetry of the period before this poem was distanced from the reader and involved subjects that were often out of the grasp of the reader entirely. By forcing his audience to join him, the poet personally, on this journey through the nightmarish world that has become the new reality for the poet, the reader, especially the one of this time, is able to see for themselves the ultimate waste, horror, and devastation of war.

If there is one central idea to glean from this study into the social and historical factors surrounding this poem, it is that it is never for a moment independent from the literary and artistic forces that are, even still part of the modern canon. In order to find a title Owen looks to the ancient Greeks, a people that valued conquest and the glory of war above many other aspects of life. He found an overriding statement that could be applied to modern times and self-consciously used this title to reflect the “roots” of traditional thoughts about war. It is also worth noting that Owen uses forms recognizable to the average late Victorian reader. “Dolce et Decorum Est” begins as a common sonnet, therefore the gruesome nature of much of the subject material—with all of its inherent filth, death, and chaos is transposed on a structure of poetry (the sonnet) that is all about the opposite; order, cleanliness and organization of through and prose. It is no accident that Owen used these recognizable forms to illustrate the flaws of the old ways of thinking and in some ways, one might even consider his poem to be rather postmodern in the sense that it heaps together “relics” of the intellectual past and attempts to superimpose them on a kind of newly created reality.

This poem would have far less meaning if it were devoid of the cultural and literary clues such as those mentioned above. In some ways it can be a considered a kind of sick parody of these recognizable poetic forms and themes (mainly war and its glory). By using thee methods as well as having the poem directly involve the reader and seem almost autobiographical in nature, Owen was able to transcend the rules of poetry and representations of war for the future. It seems as though it would be quite impossible for men to ever go back to feeling the way Achilles is said to have in the Greek dramas—grand and glorious; indestructible and willing to fight to the death. Still, as the shock over the horrors f war subsided and everything began to look a little less surreal, one might imagine, to the Victorians, they had to face the fact that the society that could see life, love, and war through rose-colored lenses had disappeared forever.

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Other essays and articles related to this topic in the Literature Archives include :Converging Themes in War and Poetry : Szymborska and Komunyakaa  •  Persistent Themes in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats  •  Poem Analysis of “Do Not Go Gently into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas  •   Analysis of the Poem “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath •  Analysis of the Poem “Pit Pony” by William Greenway •  American History Since 1865: Major Events and Trends

Works Cited

Backman, Sven. Tradition Transformed: Studies in the Poetry of Wilfred Owen. Lund: Gleerup-Liber, 1979.

Campbell, J. “Combat Gnosticism: The Ideology of First World War Poetry Criticism.” New Literary History 30.1 (1999): 203

Cyr, Marc D. “Formal subversion in Wilfred Owen’s `Hospital Barge’.” Style 28.1 (1994): 65

Furtak, RA. “Poetics of Sentimentality.” Philosophy & Literature 26.1 (2002): 207

Gardiner, John. “Lost Victorians.” History Today 49.12 (1999): 18

Griffith, George V. “Owen’s Dulce Et Decorum Est.” Explicator 41.3 (1983): 37

Harari YN. “Martial Illusions: War and Disillusionment in Twentieth-Century and Renaissance Military Memoirs.” Journal of Military History 69.1 (2005): 43

Knox. “A few deaths, here and there.” Mortality 7.1 (2002): 47

Lane, Arthur E. An Adequate Response: The War Poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1972.

Liddell Hart, A History of the World War, 1914–1918 (1934)

Rubin Jr., Louis D. “Literature and the great war.” Sewanee Review 100.1 (1992): 130

Stallworthy, Jon. Wilfred Owen (Dolce et Decorum Est). New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.

Sychterz, J. Silently Watch (ing) the Dead: The Modern Disillusioned War Poet and the Crisis of Representation in Whitman’s Drum-Taps.” Discourse 25.3 (2003):