Owen Wilson: career overview and filmography

Wilfred Owen and Brecht

Wilfred Owen is indisputably one of the best war poets of 20th century. For him war was nothing but a futile exercise that produces mass death and destruction. It is amazing what the poet managed to achieve in his short life of 25 years before getting killed during the First World War. Despite his youth, Owen displayed eat maturity in his work and his work reflects his anger, frustration, hatred and intense disappointment at the futility of war. In his poem 'Strange Meeting', he encapsulated his views on war and his generation's experience of the same in one single line: 'The pity of war, the pity war distilled'. This line was followed by his prophetic views on war and its effects on people:

Now men will go content with what we spoiled.

Or discontent, boil bloody and be spilled.

They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress,

None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.

Owen made a significant and immensely important statement about war specifically the First World War. This was a period characterized by external conflicts and internal hopelessness. War had only added to the misery of people. Owen understood this clearly since he couldn't comprehend how war could ever solve the problems that nations encountered. His deep and almost seething sense of pity and futility of war had awakened him to the internal war that each soldier faced when fighting on the battlefield. He believed that soldiers do not approve of killings, they cannot possibly see people dying yet they are forced to commit these crimes in the name of loyalty and patriotism.

He spoke of a generation that was untrained in the art of killing and was simply unskilled in war yet they were required to commit some seriously heinous acts because they were fighting for their country's honor.

Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.

I would have poured my spirit without stint

But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.

Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.

I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned

Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.

I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.

Let us sleep now....

(Strange Meeting)

Bertolt Brecht on the other hand is not as sensitive a war writer as Wilfred. While Owen was concerned about the horrors of war and spoke about its effects of a young generation of soldiers, Brecht was more concerned about the political aspect of war. He was a radical by many means. Witnessing some of the worst mutilation cases in Europe during the war, Brecht forwarded a pacifist view of war in his works. There are some horrible images that emerge from his work primarily due to his pacifist viewpoint and his satirical outlook on war. Radicalism like Brecht's marked this entire generation and some of his views were so aggressively against the mainstream that they earned him displeasure and censure of the reigning political factions of his country.

Owen did not subscribe to any romanticized view of war. Like Brecht, he abhorred the word glory in connection with war and soldier's actions. But while Brecht was highly critical of politics and policies that had created the agonizing war in the first place, Owen was more focused on the personal effects of war. For him, war had a personal message to deliver to every living human being. He felt that it was through the experience of some that the majority must benefit. He simply believed in telling the truth as he saw it yet his views did not contain the naturalistic hopelessness that Brecht's work is plagued with. Brecht finds man at the mercy of forces beyond his control; Owen on the other hand feels that man can control his circumstances only if he knew better or behaved wisely. Owen dismissed the idea of glory of war since he couldn't see anything worth glorification in the excruciatingly painful drama of war.

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori."

(Dulce et decorum est)

Naturalism is evident in Brecht's view of war. He feels that man must possess immense courage to see him through tough times because they are simply beyond man's controls. The external forces that work to destroy the mankind are immensely powerful and courage is the only weapon man has against such enemy forces. His plays and poems both highlight an intensely pessimistic view of war that doesn't try to attack war itself but the forces that gave birth to it. The effects of war are rarely discussed in details like we find in Owen's works but Brecht focuses on man's individual reactions to such catastrophic events. Two songs from Brecht's writings highlight his views on war: one is Mother Courage's "Song of the Great Capitulation" in the fourth scene and the "Song of the Wise and Good." The first song presents a lyrical view of the scene. Obedience, order and loyalty mark the scene since no disturbance in established order is tolerated and soldiers have strict instructions to obey the higher-ups. This is interestingly very different from what we read in Owen's work.