Owen's poems began to take on a more modernist perspective as he becomes more individualistic and experimentative in his writing, in an attempt to expose this- pity of war'.
One example of the influence of Modernism in his writing is seen in Owen's poem Exposure ; written in the unusually bitter winter of 1918, and which describes soldiers experiences of being caught in a 'salient'. The poem shows Owen's individualism through his subversion of popular' imagery (that of the Romantics) to reveal the truth about war. The portrayal of nature in the poem: the mad gusts' of the merciless iced east winds that knive' and the poignant misery of the dawn', is negative and introduces the idea that the soldiers in the salient are under attack, not only by the enemy, but from nature as well. In fact, in this instance it seems as if nature itself is the enemy. Owen's use of pathetic fallacy develops this idea; the description of Dawn massing her army', the referral to the stealth' of the snowflakes and the deathly' nature of the air are images that are at once animated in the reader's mind so that it seems that nature is making an almost human effort to destroy the lives of the soldiers. Owen's imagery in the poem, is also modernistic because it seems personal. Owen's entire, dismal portrayal of the winter morning is a description that can exist only in the mind of a soldier who is being slowly, but irreversibly, savaged by the pressures of war. Thus, snow which is of course white, seems to color the air black and is conveyed as hostile- attacking in shivering ranks of grey' and even something as ordinary as the wind tugging on the wire surrounding the trench is given a macabre comparison - likened to the twitching agonies of men. It seems then that Owen paints this particular winter scene not to delight the masses, but to convey the personal hell the soldiers of World War One usually found themselves in.
THE WAR AND ITS IMPACT ON ENGLISH LITERATURE INTRODUCTION: The First World War, or the Great War as it used to be called, is rightly thought of as bringing cataclysmic changes in life and thought and social forms. Yet in acknowledging these transformations we must remember that revolutionary...
Modernism is one of the key words of the first part of the century. Modernism is essentially post-Darwinian: it is a search to explain mankind's place in the modern world, where religion, social stability and ethics are all called into question. ... Against Modernism it was said that it produced chaotic and difficult writing, that it moved beyond the capacity of many readers and became elitist. ... But all through what might be termed the period of Modernism there were writers who kept working away in more traditional modes. ... Late Hardy Few poets better convey the uneasy transition ...
