The Glorious Absurdity of War from Horace to Owen

For millennia, historians and strategists have tried to make sense of the politics of war, but war is emotional just as much as it is political. Poetry is one of the few mediums that can truly express the extreme blend of violence, boredom, and fear of warfare both ancient and modern. Poets, in particular those who have experienced war firsthand, are uniquely positioned to illuminate the absurdity of war.

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That’s what war is: absurd. The concept of transporting ordinary young people, those just beginning to enter adulthood, to the most perilous and primeval circumstances to fight strangers for an inarticulate national cause is beyond logic and sense, yet it has become second nature to human society. The creation of the modern nation-state in recent centuries has only added to the absurdities of war. Now, instead of fighting for power or honor, wars are fought for “national pride,” “patriotism,” and other such undefinable absurdities. 

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Perhaps one of the greatest war poets of all time, Wilfred Owen, captures the horror and extremity of war in “Dulce Et Decorum Est.” Though often overlooked by readers, Owen’s poem is not simply a critique of war propaganda and glorification, but an allusion to classical militarism and masculine belligerence. The title and final lines are taken directly from Horace, the renowned Roman poet who came of age in a time of political intrigue and war. The relevance of Horace’s verse to Owen and the enduring legacy of Owen’s own words are further proof of the tragic yet enduring pertinence of the experience of war today. 

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Understanding the experience of war in all of its complexity and intensity is a struggle. Societies spread propaganda during times of military mobilization to drum up support and fuel the war effort. The recruitment posters and dehumanizing imagery of war propaganda become a part of national memory and historical analysis. We remember World War II not through the eyes of the soldiers who saw so many die, but through the newsreels and propaganda posters of their day. True, this realization should not diminish the moral righteousness of the Allied powers, but such simplistic narratives must be recognized as far from an accurate depiction of the worst war in history. Novels like Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and television shows like M*A*S*H* have succeeded in capturing such complexities and countering false narratives of heroism while still preserving elements of the camaraderie and shared experience of war. Poets, however, have captured the emotional life-and-death experiences of war.

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Much of Horace’s Odes promote Roman military ideology. Writing in the wake of the growth of the Roman empire and the collapse of the Republic, Horace’s Odes, a collection of poems split into four books, touch upon the far-ranging issues of empire, from love and virtue to power and patriotism. His words on war are perhaps the most famous and relevant for today: “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” or “How sweet and fitting it is to die for the fatherland.” In this line from book III, poem II of Odes, Horace reflects the militarism that was central to Roman success, the myth of the virtuous soldier that was the rallying cry of Roman society since its founding. His verse reflects the centrality of the hero soldier myth to empire and ancient society and also to modern nations and political movements. George Washington, the founder of the American military and the first president of the United States, played into this mythology, crafting a public image that placed him in line with the likes of Cincinnatus, Cicero, and Athenian political philosophers. Yet Horace’s words are not simply near-religious visions of poet warriors and philosopher kings. Sewed into these memorialized words were the boisterous patriotism and war heroism that so angered Owen nearly two thousand years later.

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Owen’s poem is a stinging critique of Horace's words and the words of his successors. In “Dulce Et Decorum Est,” Owen writes of the horrors of war, the image of a man dying in front of him from chemical weapons in the trenches. Owen condemns the way that war and the myth of the hero soldier were adopted by the British Empire, in some ways the modern successor of Roman military might. Owen died during World War I. His physical and psychological suffering at the hands of modern warfare led him to view the propagandized words of his poetic contemporaries with contempt. Centered around Horace’s words, “Dulce Et Decorum Est” is aimed at those writers in particular, those who spread the myth of heroism and honor in war:

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

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.

At heart, Owen is a realist, not an idealist. He is haunted by the horror of death, haunted by the words of Horace. His are the words of a humanitarian stuck in a trench in a Flanders field struggling to understand the clash of empires and the dying remains of his generation. If Horace offers the republican hope of virtue and service, Owen puts forth the haunting experience of an ordinary citizen flung into the chaos of militarism and violence.

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Stylistically, the two poems are surprisingly similar although they are emotional opposites. Horace’s lyric verse is riddled with imagery, anecdotes, and adages. Likewise, Owen writes with similar rhythm, rhyme, and wit, accompanied by stinging sarcasm. Horace’s words represent an older school of poetry: loftier, more pedantic, and pockmarked with divine references and personifications. Owen’s much shorter poem is more of a narrative, rarely leaving the plot line of his horrified protagonist. Horace and Owen each represent a different form of poetic power. Horace uses verse to make the high emotions and biblical experience of war real to the reader while Owen’s poetry showcases the emotional power of verse to impart the horrors of war to those who have not experienced it. Both are vital roles in modern society. A nation should not send its children to die without the loftier moral ambitions of Horace, but they must not do so without Owen’s understanding of the absurd horror of war itself.