“Anthem for Doomed Youth”, a sonnet by Wilfred Owen, is among the earliest of his poems about the conditions of modern warfare he had encountered on the Western Front during his service as a junior officer in the First World War. Owen wrote it in September 1917 while recuperating from shell-shock at Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh, and while under the influence of his new friend and literary mentor, Siegfried Sassoon. It was not published until the appearance of Owen’s Poems (1920) two years after his death in battle. The text of the poem now most widely adopted was established by Jon Stallworthy in 1983, departing from the 1963 text of C. Day Lewis only in two matters of punctuation. Earlier editions (1920; 1931) …
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Citation: Baldick, Chris. "Anthem for Doomed Youth". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 14 January 2015 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=35565, accessed 22 November 2024.]
