Anthem for Doomed Youth Analysis

"Anthem for Doomed Youth" is a sonnet written mostly in iambic pentameter. Right? Right. For you poets and poetesses out there, that might sound like a no brainer. But for those of you who are new...

Our speaker is disembodied. No, we don't mean he had his head chopped off in the heat of battle. We mean, he doesn't seem to be physically present. He's not there to experience any of the things he...

Here's the short version: it's World War I, folks, and we're in the trenches. But alas, the short version is nothing without the longer version, and when it comes to setting, that's a bit more comp...

With its end rhymes, rhythms and references to choirs and bells, this poem is downright musical. And that's as it should be, right? After all, it's called an "Anthem" for a reason. And while we can...

Owen is really laying all his cards on the table with this one. The word "doomed" raises the stakes right away, wouldn't you say? It alerts us to the fact that this poem is going into some heavy te...

Okay, so Wilfred Owen isn't the only poet to write about the experience of being a soldier. But he did it as powerfully as anyone. Plus, there aren't that many poets who actually were soldiers, and...

We might need to reach for the dictionary a couple of times (orisons? come again?), and there's a good bit going on in a small space, but on the whole the poem is direct and approachable.

Ever heard of a guy named Sassoon? No not Vidal. Siegfried. Siegfried Sassoon. He was a buddy of Wilfred Owen's and he helped the young poet pen "Anthem for Doomed Youth." The two of them met in th...

Nope, nothing sexy here. Just war and death. Now, we know what you're thinking: but Hollywood makes war and death so sexy! Well, that's exactly the idea of war that this poem takes apart.

World War I (1-14)