The Outsider: A Critical Comparison Between Futility by Wilfred Owen and Dead Man's Dump by Isaac Rosenberg

... The Outsider A Critical Comparison Between Futility by Wilfred Owen and Dead Man's Dump by Isaac Rosenberg The First World War produced some of the twentieth century's greatest poetry. However, from our twenty-first century vantage point, it seems obvious that the 1914-1918 conflict was a waste of hundreds of thousands of young lives, a pointless, self-serving contest between dying Empires. The theme that links the poetry of these young men is perhaps, therefore, futility: the futility of their lives, the loss of which made no difference to the outcome of the war. The terror, desperation and anger of the 'Doomed Youths'- might have been forgotten had it not been embodied in their own words. This futility perhaps can be divided into two categories: relative and total impotence. Relatively impotent describes men such as Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, whose birth and education secured commissions, and supplied them with a ready-made audience of

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