A Psychoanalytical Approach to Wilfred Owen’s War Poetry

Abstract

Wilfred Owen, honored as the most important poet during WWI, is determined to reveal the truth about the war from a soldier’s point of view. “Dulce et Decorum Est” and “Hymn for Doomed Youth” are his most prestigious works, a strong testimony to his innovative spirit and his coordinated verse. His war poetry has been discussed by many scholars both abroad and at home through different points of view: stylistics, literary devices, themes, Owen’s ideas about war, or the differences between Owen’s war poetry and others’. Most people have focused on the mental traumas of soldiers caused by war, but only a few people utilize psychoanalytical theories to analyze his poems. This paper is thus a psychoanalytic approach to Owen’s war poetry, drawing on Freud's war thought and Fromm’s theory of alienation of human nature, with a focus on further exploration of themes in Owen’s writing. The conclusion is that Owen’s war poetry is intended to convey the idea that the essence of war is the instinct of destruction masked by idealistic motives or the instincts of love, to shed light on the alienation caused by war and to represent a glimmer of hope for war by declaring violence to be a choice despite instincts. Through analysis, this paper intends to make a better understanding of Owen’s war poetry.