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WILFRED OWEN
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••mark rawlinson
Wilfred Owen’s cultural prominence is obvious, but also extraordinary, and it
requires an effort of estrangement to begin to analyse its basis and its implications.
The most famous and praised of a band of ‘cultural heroes’, ‘his name has become
synonymous with ‘‘war poetry’’ ’.^1 Owen is an iconic victim and scapegoat: ‘It was
the war experience, the unanticipated horror of trench-combat, that turned him
into the poet we now value so highly and respond to with such gratitude—gratitude
because, more than any other poet of a century darkened by two mighty wars, he
was able to tell us what war felt like and would feel like.’^2 Owen’s reputation is
not limited but guaranteed by his association with the war. It has been claimed,
uncharitably, that in English schools today, poetry just is war poetry.^3 Some
historians fear that Owen has become, by default, the primary authority on
1914–18, the pointsman in literary criticism’s supposed campaign to wrest the
First World War from the military historians.^4 But if our general and pedagogic
culture has made of Owen an accessible modern, and an absolute historical witness,
his normative status threatens to reduce his poems to convergent paraphrases and
memorable epigrams. (Owen’s most famous lines are a quoted, and rejected, Latin
(^1) Adrian Caesar,Taking It Like a Man: Suffering, Sexuality and the War Poets(Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1993), 1 and 115.
(^2) Ian Hamilton,Against Oblivion: Some Lives of the Twentieth-Century Poets(London: Penguin,
2003), 103. 3
By the history editor of theTimes Literary Supplement. See David Horspool, ‘Back to Battle
Stations’,The Guardian, 21 Apr. 2001, Saturday Review, 9.
(^4) The American critic Paul Fussell is singled out as the von Schlieffen behind this territorialcoup.
See Ian Beckett, ‘The Military Historian and the Popular Image of the Western Front, 1914–1918’,
The Historian, Spring 1997, 11; and Brian Bond,The Unquiet Western Front: Britain’s Role in Literature
and History(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 88.