Anthem for Doomed Youth - Definition and Overview

Anthem for Doomed Youth is one of the best-known and most popular of Wilfred Owen's poems.

It was written in 1917, when Owen was a patient at Craiglockhart Military Hospital near Edinburgh, recovering from shell shock. The poem itself is a lament for young soldiers whose lives were unnecessarily lost in World War I. Owen met and became intimate with another poet at the hospital, Siegfried Sassoon, and asked for his assistance in polishing his rough drafts. The amended manuscript copy, in both men's handwriting, still exists, and may be found at the Wilfred Owen Manuscript Archive online. Interestingly, Sassoon's amendations make up the most memorable parts of the poem. It was he who named it 'Anthem', and who substituted 'Doomed' for 'Dead'; the famous epithet of "patient minds" is also a correction of his.