Wilfred Owen and The Modernism

             The Modernist era arrived in late nineteenth century Europe due to a general change in the attitude of the time. The effects of Industrialization on Europe's society, the development of scientific theories, such as Darwin's evolution theory', and the tension between the European nations that was to eventually escalate into World War One, called into question the existence of God and the rationality of Mankind. Modernism was a part of [this] disturbed, transformational period of European history [which] contained and incorporated its sensibility of transition and its rising sense of crisis, (Bradbury 13).
             The greatest works of the Modernist era were written around and during the time of the Great War (1914-1918) and conveyed the turmoil that transpired in European war-time society. At the commencement of the war, there was a rush on the part of young men in Europe to enlist in the armed forces. Many of these new recruits were talented, educated men and when exposed to the harsh reality of warfare, they naturally engaged in writing verse about the heightened emotion of those times what was known as war verse' (Swinnerton 249). One of the more popular war poets is Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), who began his career as a poet sometime before the War, and whose earlier style of writing, observed in poems like 'Sonnet Written At Teigmouth, On A Pilgrimage To Keats's House' (1911) was derived from that the Romantic ideology, which stated that poetry 'should be personal (to the point of appearing confessional), sincere (which meant limitations on satire and humor) and richly loaded with imagery' (Purkis 82.) However, after enlisting in the army and experiencing firsthand the atrocities of warfare, Owen began to alter his ideas concerning the nature of poetry, stating that he was no longer concerned with poetry, but with the subject of war and the pity of war. The Poetry [being] in the pity [sic]' (Breen 4).