Quote:
Originally posted by Melusine:
Not so very odd, if you know who Wilfred Owen actually was. Even though he considered himself a pacifist, he enlisted to fight for England in WWI. After suffering shell shock and being brought into hospital, he met Siegfried Sassoon, another WWI poet, and Robert Graves. They encouraged his writing. In August 1918 Owen was declared fit to return to the Western Front. He was killed by machine-gun fire only a week before the Armistice. "Dulce et decorum est" is obviously ironic, even cynical.
What you say about the poem is not what a literary critic would read into it, nor did Owen himself intend them in that way (even though I'm not saying it's explicitly pacifist, mind).
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so, what does 'dulce et decorum est' mean in English anyway? Might help in interpreting the message of the poem if I actually knew what it's English title was (and before you start, yes I realize that intended meaning can be lost in translation, but I'm a lazy, mono-linguistical clod... [img]smile.gif[/img] ).