wilfred owen tag—as if Eliot could be sampled for effect by repeating ‘Pois’ascose nel foco che gli
affina’.)
This fate is marked by some obvious ironies. A poet who appeared to deprecate
poetry in order better to resist social amnesia is now lord of the modern Parnassus,
apotheosized as a witness to historical horror and even as a fictional character.
His work is misremembered or misrecognized as a kind of attenuated and graphic
combat story; and his lines are widely valued, in defiance of the evidence, for their
refusal or transcendence of the merely poetic. As the archetypal ‘poetry as witness’,
Owen’s writing is beyond faulting: the absence of his verse from W. B. Yeats’sOxford
Book of Modern Verse(1936) and Yeats’s studied refusal of the emergent category
of the war poet—‘passive suffering is not a theme for poetry’^5 —have widely been
viewed as a perversity. In the words of Seamus Heaney, ‘what we might call his
sanctity is a field of force which deflects anything as privileged as literary criticism.
His poems have the potency of human testimony, of martyr’s relics, so that any
intrusion of the aesthetic can feel like an impropriety.’^6 But Desmond Graham
has argued persuasively that Owen’s poems deserve more exacting readings, the
product of critical attention with its attendant improper questions:
This is partly because, used to other, moreapparent obscurities we tend to read Owen
slackly, assuming that we already know what he is saying; and it is partly the result of a
general familiarity with the Great War andthe anti-war spirit it engendered. The familiarity
is especially dangerous as it encourages us to absorb both Owen’s poetry and the war itself
back into cliches of attitude. The once fresh expos ́ e of the lies of militarism can live in our ́
minds as a commonplace.^7
Where recent scholarship has attempted this, it has done so largely by restoring the
poems to Owen and to the historical contexts of their creation.^8 And in doing so,
it might be said, Owen’s poems have had to be reclaimed from his readers, as if to
endorse Yeats’s remark to Dorothy Wellesley: ‘There is every excuse for him but
none for those who like him.’^9
For, as Graham suggests, Owen’s poems have been appropriated as vehicles for
familiar and anachronistic attitudes. The future pacifist John Middleton Murry
(^5) W. B. Yeats, ‘Introduction’, inidem(ed.),The Oxford Book of Modern Verse(Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1936), p. xxxiv. Meanwhile, Michael Roberts, inThe Faber Book of Modern Verse
(1936) was celebrating the vowel cadences of Owen’s half-rhymes.
(^6) Seamus Heaney, ‘The Interesting Case of Nero,Chekhov’s Cognac and a Knocker’, inThe
Government of the Tongue: The 1986 T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures and Other Writings(London: Faber,
1988), p. xiv. 7
8 DesmondGraham,TheTruthofWar:Owen,Blunden,Rosenberg(Manchester:Carcanet,1984), 24.
With no claim to inclusivity, one can highlight in this respect the work of Dominic Hibberd,
building on the editorial and biographical scholarship of Jon Stallworthy, and the exegesis offered by
Douglas Kerr,Wilfred Owen’s Voices: Language and Community(Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1993).
(^9) W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, 26 Dec. 1936, inLetters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy
Wellesley, ed. Kathleen Raine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 113.