Creative & Critical - Assignment Example

However consistent the effects of that approach to achieving peace is, the fact remains that nobody wants to be involved in a war. No man would willingly become a soldier, ready to kill nameless others who have not done him personal harm but rather harmed his nation or a weaker one that needed protection. While numerous articles and opinion papers in the 21st century have condemned war and its outcomes to the best of the writers abilities, the most scathing condemnation of war was not done during our most recent times.

Rather, it was written during the events unfolding within World War I by Wilfred Owen in his sonnet “Dulce Et Decorum Est”. The gravity of the poem can only be attributed to the fact that Owen wrote the poem while recovering from shell shock or in modern lingo “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder” more commonly known as PTSD in 1917, having served as a British war soldier. Writing many a war related poems during this time including “Strange Meeting”, “Insensibility”, and “S.I.W.”, this practice was actually one of the methods that he employed in order to help him deal with the trauma of the war and its lifelong effects upon him (Williamson, Andrew “Dulce Et Decorum Est”).

It is from this highly graphic recall of his involvement in the war that led to the highly creative and almost 3-D like depiction of the war within his writing. While published posthumously in 1920 the sonnet translates into English as “It is sweet and honorable to die for ones country” (Williamson, Andrew “Dulce Et Decorum Est”). However, nothing about the lines from the sonnet depict war and the soldier experiences as being such. For example, the first stanza of the sonnet describes: Anybody who reads the above stanza without being told of the era that it was written it would absolutely swear that it was written by a modern day soldier coming home from