I watched those agonies" :Poetic Witness in Selected War Poems by Wilfred Owen

This paper deals with five of Wilfred Owen's war poems investigating how they bear witness to the suffering endured by the soldiers on the battlegrounds of World War I. 'Dulce et Decorum Est,' 'Exposure,' 'The Last Laugh,' 'The Show,' and 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' are poems written out of Owen's personal experience as a soldier who was himself killed in action. 'Poetry of witness' is a term coined by Carolyn Forché in her 1993 anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. It refers to poetry written by poets who have witnessed tragic events such as war, persecution, torture, exile, slavery, and military occupation. Drawing on Forché's theory of witness poetry and trauma theory, the paper explores how the selected poems record war atrocities and detail soldiers' plights and traumatic experiences on the battlefield.