These days, every fighting man and woman has his or her own reasons for joining the military, each of them as valid as the next.

What is Anthem for Doomed Youth About and Why Should I Care? After all, the entire world he lived in was a world at war. Of course, when we label Wilfred Owen a war poet, we shouldn't think of that as somehow diminishing the importance of his work ('Oh, he's just a war poet'). Owen died just days before the end of WWI, but in the fourteen months leading up to his death he produced a body of work that has come to be recognized as some of the best war poetry ever written. And the poems hold that horror-filled image up next to the more patriotic versions of war we get at home, so the reader could see how different, and how terrible, war truly is. (By the way, jingoism refers to the following attitude: 'Our country is the greatest ever! Our enemies are vile and worthless! Let's go smash 'em good! Dying for your country is holy and glorious! Hurrah!') But 'Anthem for Doomed Youth,' along with Owen's other poems, brings the reader right into the normally hidden senselessness of this fighting, and the brutality, too. In Britain (and in much of the world), talk of the war was steeped in a jingoism that hid the realities of what was going on. With some help from Sassoon, Owen was soon writing brilliant, biting poems, including 'Anthem for Doomed Youth,' which was published posthumously in 1920. Fortunately for us, this revolution in his thinking was also matched by big improvements in his writing. But over time, after grueling months in the trenches, and through his encounter with Siegfried Sassoon (an older soldier and poet who was pretty cynical about the war) Owen came to realize that the realities of battle were far different from what he'd been led to believe. He entered the Great War full of enthusiasm and patriotic fervor, ready to fight and die for his country. Wilfred Owen, the poet behind 'Anthem for Doomed Youth,' was a young British officer in World War I. And where the fighting is, things are a lot less glamorous. But, it's often completely detached from what's actually going on where the fighting is. There's a lot of talk about patriotism and glory. There are funerals and prayers, parades and flag waving. Back home, there's usually a whole bunch of pomp and circumstance in wartime.

And it's a reality that a lot of the general public is sheltered from. Sure, that's a cliché courtesy of William Tecumseh Sherman, but it's also a reality that a lot of soldiers throughout history have lived through.

Anthem for doomed youth by wilfred owen