Dulce et Decorum Est (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

Many writers, including the prominent British poet C. Day Lewis, have commented that Owen’s war poems are among the best written in our century. Though Owen lived to see only four of his poems published, he wrote nearly all of his best work, including “Dulce et Decorum Est,” in a span of only one year, the twenty-sixth and last year of his life. Lewis notes the maturity of these poems: “It was as if, during the weeks of his first tour of duty in the trenches, he came of age emotionally and spiritually.” Lewis cites “the originality and force of [the poems’] language” as well as their passion and “harsh realism.” “Dulce et Decorum Est” marks the period which, according to Lewis, made Owen a major poet capable of changing people’s minds about war. The sudden maturation of Owen’s work, writes Lewis, represents “a forced growth, a revolution in his mind which, blasting through all the poetic brick-a-brack, enabled him to see his subject clear — ‘War, and the pity of War.’”

Not all have agreed that “the pity of war” — Owen’s own phrase — is a basis for sound poetry. William Butler Yeats, for one, determined the “passive suffering” in Owen’s work an unfit theme. Critic Samuel Hazo has challenged the notion that many of the poems spring from pity at all. Instead, Hazo suggests, the bulk of Owen’s work arises from uncontrolled indignation. “Many of them,” he writes in Renascence, “are revelations of acrimony, protest, pessimism, outrage and hatred.” While Hazo admits Owen manages to achieve a degree of objectivity in some poems, he finds “Dulce et Decorum Est” to be merely didactic. “Whatever is poetic in it,” Hazo writes, “is subordinated to a rhetorical end.”