Who wrote the World War I poem 'Dulce et Decorum Est'?

Who wrote the World War I poem 'Dulce et Decorum Est'? Wilfred Owen wrote it. He drafted the poem in 1917 while serving as a British soldier during World War I, drawing on the realities of trench warfare and poison-gas attacks.

The poem describes exhausted soldiers marching from the front when a gas shell lands among them. One man fails to fit his mask in time, and the speaker watches him suffer. Owen uses brutal sensory imagery to challenge patriotic claims that dying for one's country is glorious or “sweet and fitting.”

The Latin title comes from the Roman poet Horace's phrase dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, meaning it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. Horace supplied the quotation, but Owen wrote the modern poem and turns the phrase into what he calls an “old Lie.”

Owen revised the poem in 1918, and it was published posthumously in 1920, after his death in combat in November 1918. John McCrae, Rupert Brooke, and Siegfried Sassoon were also associated with wartime poetry, but none wrote this particular poem.