In World War 1 Britain had a small army and they needed to get men to join up, they did this mainly by using recruiting poems, which appeared in newspapers and music hall songs. In the recruiting poems the poet usually uses either street language, catchy rhythm, simple rhyme scheme and easy to understand and remember. In my essay I will look at some pro-war poems and see how they are countered by the anti-war poems of Wilfred Owen. The first poem that we looked at was a pro war poem by Harold Begbie called Fall in. In...
it as if he was someone in the gas attack. He also uses an excellent description when he sais "as under a green sea" because it means that there is a lot of gas.

I think Owen was successful in his aims in some ways because a lot of people didn't sign up for the war when they read his poems because his poems describe what the war was like but a lot of people still joined up for the war. His poems were so powerful because of his use of language and brilliant his choice of words.