A Concise Commentary on Anthem for Doomed Youth "Anthem for Doomed Youth" is an elegy in which Wilfred Owen conveys his heart felt sadness and disgust for the loss of life in World War I. This poem shatters the fantasized images of war by juxtaposing the opposite worlds of reality and the romanticized rhetoric that distorts it. He writes about the true experience of military death, and effectively expresses these powerful sentiments in only fourteen …showed first 75 words of 994 total…

…showed last 75 words of 994 total…is usually a superficial, upbeat, sappy song. This anthem is sad, gloomy, and somber. This usage of irony gives the poem a shocking effect by packaging the text of the poem in the form of a sonnet and anthem while the poem has a message that is antithetical to those two genres. This seemingly paradoxical approach makes the reader feel the power of Owen's concepts because those concepts are so strongly contrasted by conflicting images.