The poet and soldier, Wilfred Owen, was a famous war poet who served during World War I. On January 12th, 1917, Wilfred Owen witnessed a man getting gassed which was later reported through Owen's poem "Dulce Et Decorum Est." This poem was written while Owen was undergoing treatment in the Craiglockheart hospital. "Dulce Et Decorum Est", along with "Anthem for Doomed Youth" and "The Show" exposed the reality of being a soldier in a war. "Dulce Et Decorum Est" involves Owen watching a man die from getting gassed, and this poem features violent language such as lines 21-22, where Owen writes "If you could hear at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs." The title of this poem originates from a poem by Horace, and "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" means that it is "sweet and honorable to die for one's country." At the end of Owen's poem, he warns that we need to stop sharing this lie to children. By sharing this poem, Owen is exposing the horrors of war and making others aware of the realities. This poem serves as a warning, and we often warm others of awful things in order to spread awareness. This poem comes from not only a desire to physically protect others, but to also mentally protect. Based on the words in Owen's poem, it is clear that he is traumatized by the things he has seen and because he wrote many other poems about the horrors of war, he wants others to understand the war should not be glorified. It is in our nature as humans to keep others safe, and this is the desire Owen acts on by writing such violently honest poems about World War I. 

Sources:

"Dulce et Decorum est." The Poetry Society, https://poetrysociety.org.uk/education/page-fright/joelle-taylor/dulce-e....

Owen, Wilfred. "Dulce Et Decorum Est." The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, et al., Eleventh ed., vol. F, W.W. Norton, 2012, pp.170.

Wilfred Owen. 1920. Commons Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wilfred_Owen_2.png.

"Wilfred Owen." Poetry Foundation, 2025, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/wilfred-owen.