Reassessing Wilfred Owen
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing REASSESSNG WILFRED OWEN BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Having long loved his war verses, I was delighted to learn about Wilfred Owen: The Complete Poems and Fragments (Norton, 560 pp.,...
...Let the majestic insult of their iron mouths Be as the priest words of their burials...
...Let us sleep now...
...Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honor, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War, and the pity of War...
...It doesn 't like our cheeks so red: Young blood's its great objection...
...Only the solemn anger of our guns...
...Battlefield elegies for dead comrades metamorphize, in his civilian verse, into homoerotic sonnets of a distastefully precious and coy sort...
...Certain events appear to inhibit the creative impulse...
...Perhaps we should have listened more closely to his own statement about his great war poems: "Above all, I am not concerned with Poetry...
...I parried...
...But Owen's overriding purpose was not to generate disgust...
...Offended by what seems to him to be the hypocrisy of those who wept over the men they had sent off to their deaths, he lashed out in "Anthem for Doomed Youth": What passing bells for those who die as cattle...
...Only a genius can stand up under the scrutiny of his juvenilia, second thoughts, punctuation variants, and other rough-draft minutiae...
...His weakest writing coexisted with his strongest right to the end...
...Alas, Stallworthy's amassed evidence demonstrates (albeit not to him) that Owen failed to improve...
...Like Owen, we found it easy to believe the real enemies were not foreign soldiers, but the old men who ordered the battles...
...A draft left unfinished at his death was pure "Poesy...
...Thus he shows Abraham refusing the sacrificial ram so that he might slay Isaac, "And half the seed of Europe, one by one...
...It turns out that Stallworthy's Complete Poems contains little one has not seen before...
...Unfortunately, he was not a Keats or Chatterton displaying flashes of teenage genius...
...An officer (probably Owen himself) is reprimanding one of his men for being " dirty on parade...
...A more cynical temperament could not have successfully maintained his innocent outrage...
...Stallworthy's biography underscored how seeringly life in the trenches affected Owen: Home on leave, he carried pictures of atrocities in his pocket as visual proof of the horrors he had witnessed...
...The world is washing out its stains,' he said...
...Eighty-nine schoolboy effusions precede the earliest mature poem...
...Interest in Owen's poems revived in the 1960s, after Benjamin Britten set nine of them to music in his War Requiem...
...But when we're duly white-washed, being dead, The race will bear Field Marshal God's inspection.' Although the somewhat forced irony is far from Owen's best, this is the first instance of natural language and a poetic sense that we encounter...
...The new diction did not come easily for a long time...
...Many of his poems eloquently describe their methods of coping, or not, with life in the trenches: composing white lies to reassure families at home, the refusal to accept the death of a buddy, loss of nerve under fire...
...That is why the true Poets must be truthful...
...In 1920, however, his mentor Siegfried Sassoon published a slim, well-received volume of Owen's work...
...I Not worse than ours the existences rats lead—" never dispelled his mooniness about Keats and Wilde or provided him with authentic alternative themes...
...Underlying his attitudes is a child's shock at the discovery that life can be unfair...
...The soldier later explains that the spot on his uniform came from an injury: 'Blood's dirt,' he laughed, looking away, Far off to where his wound had bled And almost merged forever into clay...
...What a shock to finally encounter in the 90th poem a voice speaking straightforward English...
...The effect on the reader is appalling...
...others inspire powerful statements from writers who otherwise exhibit no particular genius...
...Owen was infatuated with the archaic diction of early Romantic poetry, or, as he preferred, "Poesy...
...Writers & Writing REASSESSNG WILFRED OWEN BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Having long loved his war verses, I was delighted to learn about Wilfred Owen: The Complete Poems and Fragments (Norton, 560 pp., Two Volumes, $65.00) edited by the poet's recent biographer, Jon Stallworthy...
...Yeats discovered his subject early but spent years developing the wisdom to do it justice...
...Nevertheless, forme, these volumes have destroyed the illusion of Owens as a deathless poet—immortal as his depiction of the pity of War still is...
...the other foot was mired infin-de-siecle decadence...
...One hates to believe that Owen was simultaneously polishing lines of that ilk and working on "Dulce et Decorum Est...
...So I felt sure that Stallworthy's collected evidence would prove once and for all that Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) was memorable for more than a few anthology pieces...
...Only the monstrous anger of the guns...
...All a poet can do today is warn...
...I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed...
...They proved timely for those of us watching our generation fight in Vietnam...
...Apologia Pro Poemate Meo" started out as an overwritten invocation to the god of War before it was honed down to the spare, bitter piece we know...
...The poetry is in the pity...
...Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote Pre-Raphaelite verselets until Jesuit discipline forced him into more rigorous channels...
...but my hands were loath and cold...
...Why can't it be said that Owen's pallid mufti productions put on splendid uniforms to go to war...
...Reading Stallworthy's compilation, I realized for the first time how youthful Owen actually was—and sounds...
...Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory...
...The juvenilia of both writers, though, while not very good in itself, attest to their evolving understanding of the nature of poetry...
...The "warning" and "truthfulness" in such lines as "O Life, Life, let me breathe— a dug-out rat...
...Strange Meeting" imagines a discussion after death between the shades of an English soldier and his German counterpart about the lives they might have had...
...Stall-worthy reprints numerous drafts of "Anthem for Doomed Youth...
...no prayers nor bells...
...No mockeries now for them...
...Owen's reputation has rested on about 30 poems composed during the last two years of his life: from January 1917, when he assumed command of a British Infantry Platoon on the Western front in France, to his death in action on November 4,1918, a week before the Armistice was signed...
...he wanted to convey compassion for the troops...
...C. Day Lewis' 1964 edition included all the civilian poetry in an appendix, as well as some fragments and juvenilia...
...Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons...
...The sudden transformation can no doubt be explained in part by Owen's daily exposure to the plain speech of soldiers...
...His total achievement would reveal a great English poet killed just as his talents matured...
...On the other hand, W.B...
...Purple," revised several months after the composition of "Anthem for Doomed Youth," is a nauseating concoction of Swinburne and Wilde: "And yet the veil of Venus, whose rose skin, / Mauve-marbled, purples Eros' mouth for sacred sin...
...Finally, the German confesses: 'I am the enemy you killed, my friend...
...Disconcertingly, the moment Owen's muse went on furlough, all the bad habits came back...
...An early version read: What minute bells for these who die so fast...
...Rebellion against the Church, which often accompanies efforts to break away from home, prompted Owen to rewrite several Biblical stories into nasty parodies...
...They may be to the next...
...One wonders what could have galvanized his sympathy to the same degree in peacetime, had he lived...
...Some poets, of course, show scant promise before they find their themes...
...His brashness allows for no possibility of real debate over what he calls, "The old Lie: Dulce et decorumest/ Pro patria mori...
...He saw a mere three of his verses in print before he died...
...He indulged in invocations like "Yet shall I see fair Keats, and hear his lyre...
...To counteract the heroic pieties of Rupert Brooke and other popular poets, Owen graphically describes soldiers coughing up gas-ruined lungs, the wounded rotting with gangrene, men who have gone witless from shell shock...
...But Stallworthy has made a major change by printing everything in chronological order (to the best of his ability—he explains that he often had to resort to studying watermarks on the paper...
...Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs— The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells...
...English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them...
...Apparently, his imagination had only a toehold in modern verse...
...This stilted, rhetorical effort was reworked somewhat by Sas-soon, and that seems to have helped the younger poet find his way toward the final form of what is one of his finest poems...
...If Stallworthy agreed, he would not have put together The Complete Poems and Fragments...
...He now seems a very minor talent who for a few short years suddenly became inspired by events greater than himself...
...The rather flowery Preface that he had drafted himself declared: "This book is not about heroes...
Vol. 67 • June 1984 • No. 11
