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Lyn Ashcroft Lyn Ashcroft i(10731938 works by)
Gender: Female
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1 A Reading of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ Lyn Ashcroft , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Free Mind : Essays and Poems in Honour of Barry Spurr 2016; '“Dulce et Decorum Est”, written and revised between October 1917 and March 1918, and first published in Siegfried Sassoon’s edition of Owen’s poems in December 1920, is almost certainly Wilfred Owen’s best-known poem. 2 In the decades following its publication (especially after Cecil Day Lewis’s 1963 edition of Owen’s poetry) it has been extensively anthologised, included in school literature courses throughout the English-speaking world and become a common subject of scholarly attention. At the conclusion of his biography of Owen, Guy Cuthbertson remarks that Great Britain’s Prime Minister, David Cameron, has cited “Dulce et Decorum Est” as “his favourite piece of poetry”.3 Moreover, it has recently been claimed that in the context of today’s knowledge of the First World War, Owen is now “far more famous than, say, Field Marshal Douglas Haig or David Lloyd George”.4 And in the light of the current focus on the centenary of the First World War, Owen’s fame and interest in his poetry are likely to increase. This, it must be said, is despite some objections that Owen’s poetry has possibly been overpraised, particularly by those who favour its perceived pacifism, and that it has coloured the modern viewpoint of the First World War to the exclusion of other perspectives.5 It must also be recognised that Owen has his detractors, for example, Barry Matthews, who in 2010 published a disparaging biography, Wilfred Owen: the Old Lie, presently unobtainable, in which he accuses his subject of cowardice and paedophilia.' (Introduction)
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