“dulce Et Decorum Est” or the Insanity of the New Age.

“Dulce et Decorum Est”

Or

The insanity of the new age.

By

Rumi Pavlova

ENG 102 16

In order to express thoughts and emotions, past generations used different artistic techniques and expressions. Some of the most popular methods were found in music, theatre, dance and poetry. One of the most emotional expressive arts that directly affected the human emotions was poetry which could easily be converted into music. The ancient philosophies reveal to us that poetry was a sophisticated game of opposite emotions, moods, ideas and colorful images. “Poem tells us about life, they shape experience” to which we can relate emotionally and viscerally (Biddle & Fulwiler, 1992, p. 421). Using more contemporary terms we could say that poetry is a rhythmical compression of thoughts that can be written in different style or length and can discuss all kinds of subjects. There is a wide variety of devices used in creating and evaluating poems, such as metaphor, diction, rhythm, rhyme, sounds, tone and atmosphere, etc.

This paper focuses on the tone and other poetical devices used in “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) who shows us trough his experience the insanity of war. The major conflict in the poem is the writer’s horror of war and the poem’s title “it