Trench Poetry: Owen and Sassoon

Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) and Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) are the two most celebrated English poets of the First World War. They are often paired — they met at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh in 1917, and Sassoon's encouragement was instrumental in Owen's development as a poet. But their poetic methods are fundamentally different: where Owen reaches for pity, Sassoon deploys rage; where Owen's language is dense, musical, and formally innovative, Sassoon's is sharp, colloquial, and deliberately prosaic. Together, they represent the two dominant modes of war poetry: the elegiac and the satiric.

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Wilfred Owen

Owen is widely regarded as the greatest English-language poet of the First World War. His reputation rests on a relatively small body of work — most of his significant poems were written in the fourteen months between August 1917 and his death in action on 4 November 1918, one week before the Armistice.

Owen's Poetic Philosophy

Owen articulated his purpose with extraordinary clarity in a draft preface to a collection he never lived to publish:

"My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."

This statement is programmatic:

• "My subject is War" — not abstractions like honour or glory, but war as lived, physical experience
• "the pity of War" — pity is Owen's central emotion: compassion for the suffering of soldiers, directed outward rather than inward
• "The Poetry is in the pity" — the aesthetic value of the work lies not in its beauty but in its capacity to make the reader feel the suffering of others

"Dulce et Decorum Est"

This is Owen's most famous poem and one of the most powerful anti-war poems in any language.

Feature	Analysis
Opening imagery	"Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, / Knock-kneed, coughing like hags" — the soldiers are stripped of martial dignity, compared to beggars and hags. The similes are deliberately unglamorous, aggressively anti-heroic
The gas attack	"Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!" — the sudden shift from exhaustion to panic is enacted through the change in register: capitals, exclamation marks, monosyllables. The rhythm lurches from slow trudging to frantic urgency
The dying man	"He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning" — the three present participles pile up, each more desperate than the last. "Guttering" (like a candle) dehumanises the man, reducing him to a failing light
The dream	"In all my dreams before my helpless sight / He plunges at me" — the trauma repeats itself in dreams. Owen's use of the present tense ("plunges") makes the horror perpetual, inescapable
The address to the reader	"If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood / Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs" — the "you" is both the specific addressee (originally Jessie Pope) and the reader. "Gargling" is grotesquely precise — it makes the reader hear what Owen heard
"The old lie"	"Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori" — the Latin tag from Horace is presented as a "lie" and an "obscenity." Owen positions the classical tradition itself as complicit in the slaughter
Rhyme and half-rhyme	Owen uses full rhyme in this poem ("sacks/backs," "sludge/trudge") to create a grim, relentless momentum. His characteristic technique of half-rhyme (or pararhyme) — used most prominently in "Strange Meeting" ("groined/groaned," "hall/Hell") and "Exposure" ("knive us/nervous," "silent/salient") — creates a sense of something not quite right, something out of joint, formally enacting the dissonance of war

"Anthem for Doomed Youth"

Feature	Analysis
Title	"Anthem" suggests a hymn; "Doomed Youth" undercuts the solemnity with finality. The juxtaposition creates bitter irony
Sonnet form	Owen uses the Petrarchan sonnet — traditionally a form of love poetry — for a poem about mass death. The form creates expectations of beauty and resolution that the content savagely denies
The octave	Dominated by the sounds of battle: "monstrous anger of the guns," "stuttering rifles' rapid rattle." Onomatopoeia and alliteration create a cacophony. The guns replace the church rituals that should attend death: no "passing-bells," only artillery
The sestet	The tone shifts from public violence to private grief: "The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall." The sound effects soften — liquid consonants replace plosives. The dead are mourned not by church ceremony but by the grief of those left behind
"What candles may be held to speed them all?"	The rhetorical question exposes the inadequacy of all ritual — religious or military — in the face of mass death

"Strange Meeting"

Feature	Analysis
Setting	The speaker descends into a subterranean tunnel and meets a dead enemy soldier. The setting echoes classical descents into the underworld (Virgil's Aeneid, Dante's Inferno)
The enemy	The dead man is recognisably the speaker's counterpart — "I am the enemy you killed, my friend." The paradox of "enemy" and "friend" encapsulates Owen's vision of war as mutual destruction among men who have no personal quarrel
Half-rhyme throughout	"groined/groaned," "hall/Hell," "bestirred/stared" — the pervasive half-rhyme creates a world where nothing quite connects, nothing quite resolves. It is Owen's most formally ambitious poem
"The pity of war, the pity war distilled"	The dead soldier speaks these words — Owen's most direct statement of his poetic philosophy, placed in the mouth of the enemy

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Siegfried Sassoon