The Conception of Trauma in Depicting the Battlefields In Wilfred Owen’s War Poetry

The paper examines the poetry of Wilfred Owen as a representative of a group of poets who write poetry out of the trenches during and after World War I. Their poetry is generally known as war poetry or trench poetry. It is mostly characterized by the processing of traumatic experience through visual imagery to invoke the readers’ sense of realization to the horrors of war. Some of these poets, including Owen himself, were hospitalized due to shell shock or traumatic symptoms that affected them physically and psychologically. Such traumatic experience changes the poet’s view of war and marks him a witness to its horrors. Owen, one of the greatest of these poets, tries to put the reader in the mid of the battlefield through an extensive use of images, condensed language, and paradoxical statements to show the ugly face of war and warn the people at home of its horrors and urges them not to believe the old lie of the glories of war.