Many modernist writers—such as Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce—attempted to more closely capture the truth of life than, in their opinion, Victorian and Edwardian writers had. This involved new styles of writing, such as stream-of-consciousness, that more realistically mirrored how the human mind works. It meant capturing the subjective, fragmented way most people experience the world. It meant, overall, telling the truth about how life really is rather than sentimental or ideal tales of how we might like life to be. In this sense, at least for some writers, there was a moral (though many modernists would have rejected that pious word with a shudder) impulse behind the new style of writing: it was trying to tell the truth.
World War I coincided with and gave greater impetus and urgency to the modernist impulse. It is hard for us to imagine now what a shattering event this was at the time, especially for young adults. Europe had had no major wars for a century, and technological progress had led to an unprecedented rise in the standard of living during the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, many felt the world was at the dawn of a golden age of peace and prosperity, only to have these illusions shattered by a particularly bloody and pointless war.
Therefore, a poem like "Dulce et Decorum Est" made an impact on the modernist movement because it told the truth, in unvarnished terms, about the horrors of World War I. It went further as well, juxtaposing those horrors to the lies young people are told about the glory of warfare and dying for one's country. If part of the impetus behind modernism was to explode the lies about patriotism, God, country, and patriarchy that led nations into World War I, "Dulce et Decorum Est" was a poster child for that urge in its bitter denunciation of the high cost of feeding young people stories about war as heroic and glorious. It is unlikely that anyone who reads the searing imagery of weariness, death, and the effects of chemical warfare in the poem would ever want to be part of a war like World War I—and most of the modernists hoped never to see a war like that again.
I think the answer to this question lies in the focus of this awesome poem and the realistic way in which it is written. Let us remember that a key and central event that fed into what we know as Modernism was the Great War, or World War I, which, through the way in which old values of national honour and glory had resulted in a war that resulted in massive loss of life, created a sense of disillusionment and pessimism and a new realism. Thus we can see this poem as capturing some of the key elements of this movement through the way it acts as a reaction to romantic notions of war and honour and patriotism through its presentation of the grim realism of what soldiers actually endured.
If you look at the very first line of the poem, Owen does much to strip away any idea or impression of war's grandeur. We have a picture in our mind of soldiers as being all dressed in uniform and being strong, young men, proud to fight for their country. The first line presents the soldiers as being "like old beggars under sacks" and "coughing like hags." They are so exhausted that they are "Drunk with fatigue." When death comes, it is not at the hands of an opponent that the soldier has met in battle, it is impersonal, distant, and indiscriminate. In addition, the manner of death is horrific as the gas is shown to torture him. Note the description of the body that we are given:
And watch the white eyes writing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs...
Nothing is spared in the hideous description that we are given to communicate the way in which such notions of heroism and patriotism are actually lies. Thus the poem remains an important example of Modernist poetry through its realistic and pessimistic presentation of the realities of war.
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