Uploaded December 2014 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Here's a virtual movie of the English Poet Owen Seaman reading perhaps his most famous poem "Pro Patria" This is another of his patriotic recruiting poems designed to encourage men to join the military. Luckily for the poet himself he was too old to throw his life away by joining the slaughter of the Great War. Wilfred Owen wrote an antithesis to this poem had a very different view of war at the time than Owen Seaman. Wilfred Owen had actually been in the war and saw the horrific deaths and pain involved in it. He was very disgusted with the writers that were pro-war, people that had been writing about the war that had not experienced what he and millions of others had been thrust into,and were simply basing there patriotic outpourings on what they had been fed by the propaganda machine with no real knowledge.Owen was infuriated because he believed that it was unrealistic for people to be glorifying a war that they knew nothing about it and its consequences . One of the lines in Pro Patria, "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" translates into English from the Latin as "It is sweet and proper to die for one's country" This same line is in the poem "Dulce et Decorum Est." This writing is more anti-war than pro-war. It talks about living instead of dying for your country and proposes the following question. Would it not be better to live for your country and honor it, than die trying? Maybe dying for your country is not as satisfying as living for it because after all, once your dead, what does it matter how you died?
Sir Owen Seaman, 1st Baronet (18 September 1861 – 2 February 1936) was a British writer, journalist and poet. He is best known as editor of Punch, from 1906 to 1932.
Born in Shrewsbury, he was the only son of William Mantle Seaman and Sarah Ann Balls. He distinguished himself academically both at Shrewsbury School and later Clare College, Cambridge.[1] Following this, he worked as a schoolmaster at Rossall School (1884) and Magdalen College School, Oxford (1887-8),[2] professor of literature at Durham College of Science, Newcastle upon Tyne (1890–1903), and became a barrister of the Inner Temple in 1897.[3]
Seaman's first successful submission to the satirical and humorous magazine Punch was "Rhyme of the Kipperling", an 1894 parody of Rudyard Kipling. The same year he published a full volume of parodies entitled Horace at Cambridge.[4] After several years of submitting work which showed "a remarkable gift for the composition of light verse,"[3] he was invited to join the staff in 1897, becoming assistant editor in 1902 and finally editor in 1906. It was during his tenure there that A. A. Milne, author of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, worked as his assistant; it is thought that Seaman's dour disposition may have been the inspiration behind the gloomy character of Eeyore.[4]
In 1914 he was knighted, more likely for his creativity than for his patriotism, which saw fuller bloom in the course of World War I. During the war, he wrote "number of verses of a somewhat mindless, patriotic kind, reflecting the optimism and devotion to his native land rather than the stirrings of poetic genius," as anthologist John M. Munro put it.[5] In 1915, he published War Time, a book of poetry that Munro described as "a mixture of satiric verse and patriotic doggerel." Nevertheless, in 1933, he was created a baronet, of Bouverie Street in the City of London. Sir Owen never married, and died in 1936. He is buried in Putney Vale Cemetery.
Kind Regards
Jim Clark
All rights are reserved on this video recording copyright Jim Clark 2014
Here's a virtual movie of the English Poet Owen Seaman reading perhaps his most famous poem "Pro Patria" This is another of his patriotic recruiting poems designed to encourage men to join the military. Luckily for the poet himself he was too old to throw his life away by joining the slaughter of the Great War. Wilfred Owen wrote an antithesis to this poem had a very different view of war at the time than Owen Seaman. Wilfred Owen had actually been in the war and saw the horrific deaths and pain involved in it. He was very disgusted with the writers that were pro-war, people that had been writing about the war that had not experienced what he and millions of others had been thrust into,and were simply basing there patriotic outpourings on what they had been fed by the propaganda machine with no real knowledge.Owen was infuriated because he believed that it was unrealistic for people to be glorifying a war that they knew nothing about it and its consequences . One of the lines in Pro Patria, "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" translates into English from the Latin as "It is sweet and proper to die for one's country" This same line is in the poem "Dulce et Decorum Est." This writing is more anti-war than pro-war. It talks about living instead of dying for your country and proposes the following question. Would it not be better to live for your country and honor it, than die trying? Maybe dying for your country is not as satisfying as living for it because after all, once your dead, what does it matter how you died?
Sir Owen Seaman, 1st Baronet (18 September 1861 – 2 February 1936) was a British writer, journalist and poet. He is best known as editor of Punch, from 1906 to 1932.
Born in Shrewsbury, he was the only son of William Mantle Seaman and Sarah Ann Balls. He distinguished himself academically both at Shrewsbury School and later Clare College, Cambridge.[1] Following this, he worked as a schoolmaster at Rossall School (1884) and Magdalen College School, Oxford (1887-8),[2] professor of literature at Durham College of Science, Newcastle upon Tyne (1890–1903), and became a barrister of the Inner Temple in 1897.[3]
Seaman's first successful submission to the satirical and humorous magazine Punch was "Rhyme of the Kipperling", an 1894 parody of Rudyard Kipling. The same year he published a full volume of parodies entitled Horace at Cambridge.[4] After several years of submitting work which showed "a remarkable gift for the composition of light verse,"[3] he was invited to join the staff in 1897, becoming assistant editor in 1902 and finally editor in 1906. It was during his tenure there that A. A. Milne, author of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, worked as his assistant; it is thought that Seaman's dour disposition may have been the inspiration behind the gloomy character of Eeyore.[4]
In 1914 he was knighted, more likely for his creativity than for his patriotism, which saw fuller bloom in the course of World War I. During the war, he wrote "number of verses of a somewhat mindless, patriotic kind, reflecting the optimism and devotion to his native land rather than the stirrings of poetic genius," as anthologist John M. Munro put it.[5] In 1915, he published War Time, a book of poetry that Munro described as "a mixture of satiric verse and patriotic doggerel." Nevertheless, in 1933, he was created a baronet, of Bouverie Street in the City of London. Sir Owen never married, and died in 1936. He is buried in Putney Vale Cemetery.
Kind Regards
Jim Clark
All rights are reserved on this video recording copyright Jim Clark 2014
