The Conception of Trauma in Depicting the Battlefields In Wilfred Owen’s War Poetry

Authors

  • Salih A. Abdulrahman Department of English, College of Arts, University of Mosul, Iraq

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25007/ajnu.v8n4a482

Abstract

The paper examines the poetry of Wilfred Owen as a representative of a group of poets who write poetry out of the trenches during and after World War I. Their poetry is generally known as war poetry or trench poetry. It is mostly characterized by the processing of traumatic experience through visual imagery to invoke the readers’ sense of realization to the horrors of war. Some of these poets, including Owen himself, were hospitalized due to shell shock or traumatic symptoms that affected them physically and psychologically. Such traumatic experience changes the poet’s view of war and marks him a witness to its horrors. Owen, one of the greatest of these poets, tries to put the reader in the mid of the battlefield through an extensive use of images, condensed language, and paradoxical statements to show the ugly face of war and warn the people at home of its horrors and urges them not to believe the old lie of the glories of war.

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References

1. Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford University Press. 1975.
2. Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic. 1997.
3. Hipp, Daniel W. Poetry of Shell Shock: Wartime Trauma and Healing in Wilfred Owen, Ivor Gurney and Siegfried Sassoon. North Carolina: McFarland & Company Inc. 2005.
4. Kendall, Tim .ed., The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press. 2007.
5. McILroy, J. F. Wilfred Owen’s Poetry: A Study Guide. London: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd. 1974.
6. Reisman, Rosemary M. Canfield (edts.). Critical Survey of Poetry: War Poets. Massachusetts: Salem Press. 2012.
7. Welland, Dennis. Wilfred Owen: A Critical Study. London: Chatto & Windus Inc. 1978.
8. Wilfred Owen. The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. Ed. C. D. Lewis. New York: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1963.

Published

2019-12-28

How to Cite

Abdulrahman, S. A. (2019). The Conception of Trauma in Depicting the Battlefields In Wilfred Owen’s War Poetry. Academic Journal of Nawroz University, 8(4), 362–370. https://doi.org/10.25007/ajnu.v8n4a482

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Section

Articles