Proceedings of The International Conference on Research in Social Sciences
Year: 2019
DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.33422/rssconf.2019.05.274
An Analysis of Wilfred Owen’s War Poetry in the light of Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory
Berna Köseoğlu
ABSTRACT:
World War I influenced not only the lives of many people and changed their perspectives towards life but also the literary works of the writers and altered the tradition in literature. The Poet of World War I, Wilfred Owen, after participating in the army during the First World War, witnessed the destructive results of the war and produced his poetry regarding the terrible outcomes of war when he was a soldier. The reflection of war in his poetry proves that he was psychologically affected by the war and until his death in the war, in his poetry, he portrayed how soldiers turned out to be hopeless, helpless, exhausted and repressed by the war and why they lost the meaning and joy of life after observing the sufferings of the other soldiers and after undergoing a psychological trauma.In this sense, his own psychological distress can also be recognized in his works, therefore in this article the psychological state of both Owen and the soldiers in his poetry will be analyzed in the light of one of the most significant theorists in the field of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, who introduced new concepts in psychoanalysis and examined the psychological stages in the mind and explained the reasons behind the actions of individuals through stressing the importance of unconscious and repression of feelings.
KeyWords: Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, Wilfred Owen, War Poetry.