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E336: Twentieth-Century British Literature Wilfred Owen Study Questions Al Drake. Office: Cyber Cafe, M 6-7 | 714-434-1612 "Anthem for Doomed Youth" 1. The poem's title suggests that it is a poem appropriate in form to those it commemorates. What tone and conventions does it set forth as appropriate to the "doomed youth"? How does it ironize or undercut this conventionality? "Apologia Pro Poemate Meo" 1. How does Owen adapt the conventional meaning of certain words and actions to suit his experience of war? 2. The last two stanzas address civilian readers: what is the speaker's final judgment on the possibility of conveying or representing his experience to others who have not been through similar ones? 3. Is the problem simply one of language--i.e. there are no proper words to deal with war's violence and terror--or does the problem lie elsewhere? Explain. "Miners" 1. How does this poem's analogy between miners' work and soldiering undercut nineteenth-century narratives about the inevitability of progress, the triumph of civilization over material obstacles, of the human spirit over what Tennyson calls in In Memoriam A.H.H. "the ape and tiger [in us]"? 2. How, according to the poem by implication, is "forgetting" integral to the process of civilization? "Dulce et Decorum Est" 1. It is sometimes said that language cannot describe extreme violence or suffering. To what extent does this poem attempt to do so? What is the strategy of representation? Edition: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th. ed., Vol. 2C only. New York: Norton, 1999. ISBN: 0393975703.
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