To what degree does Owen share the concerns of Siegfried Sassoon? Select two of their poems to discuss, pointing out how they address a similar issue in their work. Which of the poets is more effective? Why? Analyze the poems to support your assertion.

Sassoon and Owen, by and large, write on similar themes and share similar concerns about the waste and horror of war. Sassoon's influence on Owen was significant; the two met at Craiglockhart Hospital in 1917, and Owen described himself as a "disciple" of Sassoon, welcoming Sassoon's edits to his work. His famous "Anthem for Doomed Youth" was called "Anthem for Dead Youth" before Sassoon supplied his edits to it.
In style, however, the two poets do differ somewhat. Owen was younger, his writing less mature, and there is greater use of dreamy lyricism and the hypothetical in his work, which can make it appear less immediate. One of his defining characteristics as a writer was the use of pararhyme, or half-rhyme; we can see this used heavily in his poem "Strange Meeting," which can be compared with Sassoon's "The Rear Guard," as both poems address the same idea in different ways.
In each of these poems, the speaker is making his way through underground tunnels in which the fallen soldiers of former battles have been left. In Owen's poem, the speaker has "escaped / down some profound dull tunnel . . . which titanic wars had groined," and in which "encumbered sleepers groaned, / Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred." Sassoon's poem, which is in the third person, describes "groping along the tunnel, step by step," and similarly the speaker attempts to wake "the sleeper" he encounters there, but with little success.
In both poems, the one "sleeper" identified among many is simply a symbol, indicative of the extent to which the fallen had become so numerous as to be almost indistinguishable from each other. Sassoon's soldier assumes the man to be a friend and struggles to wake him, his behavior irritable ("For days he'd had no sleep"). In Owen's poem, the speaker "sprang up and stared" and identifies itself as "the enemy you killed, my friend."
At the end of his poem, Sassoon's protagonist struggles his way out of the tunnel; we do not see what happens to Owen's. However, we understand that their feelings on the matter are the same: Sassoon's soldier, "with sweat and horror in his hair," is "unloading hell behind him step by step" as he ascends. Owen's observes the face of his "vision," and "by his smile I knew we stood in Hell."
It is a question of personal taste as to which poem is the more effective. Personally, however, I find the immediacy of Sassoon's poem more compelling than the lyricism of Owen's. Sassoon's poem, written in the third person, depicts the speaker as a sort of everyman; he paints details into the tunnel—"a mirror smashed, the mattress from a bed"; "the rosy glow of battle overhead"—which make the scene real. The behavior of the soldier, too, as he brusquely tries to wake the corpse—"God blast your neck!"—helps convey the state of mind of the soldier who "for days [had] had no sleep." Sensory details, such as the "sweat and horror" in the soldier's hair, help put the reader in mind of the very literal hell the soldier is moving through.
Owen's poem, by contrast, creates a different kind of atmosphere, one in which "Hell" is not the tunnel itself but the pocket of hallucinated space in which "the vision's face was grained," a place where "no guns thumped." "The pity of war" is embodied by this being who describes, in iambic pentameter heavy with sound-play—"I would have poured my spirit without stint"—how life has led him to this point. He prevails upon his interlocutor, "Let us sleep now. . . . " and the poem trails off: we may infer that the speaker, like the "vision," will eventually become one of the nameless sleepers beneath the earth, in a place untroubled by guns. The poem is atmospheric and leaves a sense of pity and horror in the reader's mind. On a personal level, however, I find it less evocative of the horrors of war than Sassoon's more visceral depiction.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47395/strange-meeting

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57268/the-rear-guard