mark rawlinson
with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do
notshare and which they have not sufficient imagination to realise.^34
Sassoon altered Owen’s sense of his past and future as a writer. Sassoon’s ‘The
Redeemer’, with its image of soldier as Christ crucified, was the poem, Owen now
wrote, ‘I have been wishing to write every week for the last three years’,^35 as if
he would backdate his identity as war poet to the outbreak of war (he joined
up in October 1915, and wrote his first war poem, ‘Inspection’, in August 1917).
Additionally, Sassoon’s declaration of dissent mapped out the social co-ordinates of
a discourse that Owen would explore in the next months, one which ventriloquized
the mute suffering soldiery and harrowed the insensitive civilian.
The British Library sketch of contents for ‘Disabled and Other Poems’ opens with
ten poems linked by a brace to the reiterated and underlined word ‘Protest’, the last
of which is ‘The Dead-Beat’, the first verses that Owen wrote in ‘Sassoon’s style’.^36
The earliest version of this poem is in quatrains, and describes soldierly insensibility
(‘clot of meat’) in juxtaposition with the Home Front discourses about the war
which are supposed to provoke it—Caxton Hall (venue of a series of political
lectures, a ‘fashionable focus for resistance to the war’, in which Bertrand Russell
opposed the Military Service Act^37 ),Punch, Bruce Bairnsfather (the invalided
soldier who created the cartoon character ‘Old Bill’), and Hilaire Belloc’s weekly
commentaries on the war inLand and Water(a continuation ofThe Country
Gentleman).^38
The revised version excises these deictical traces to create a starker myth (in
line with the remark in the draft preface about the omission of ‘proper names’):
the dead-beat is sent mad not by the remains of dead comrades but by a vision
of ‘Blighty’ and those who prosper there. (Blighty here is not the life-saving
wound, ‘a blighty’, wished for by the speaker in ‘The Chances’, but one pole in a
mind-wrenching dissonance that divides soldier and civilian.) ‘The Dead-Beat’ is
an imitation, but with its callous ‘Doc’ rejoicing at the happy resolution (‘ ‘‘That
scum you sent last night soon died’’ ’) of a diagnostic problem (is the ‘unwounded’
soldier ‘crazed’ or ‘malingering’?), the poem is unmistakably a working through of
Owen’s own predicament as a visibly whole soldier not in France but in hospital.^39
‘Protest’, for Owen, designated poems confronting the war’s negations: ‘Unre-
cognition’, ‘unnaturalness’, ‘inhumanity’, ‘lies’, and madness. The volume was to
(^34) Siegfried Sassoon, quoted in Jean Moorcroft Wilson,Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet
(London: Duckworth, 1999), 374. 35
36 Owen to Mary Owen, 29 Aug. 1917, inCollected Letters, 489.
See Owen’s lists of contents, inThe Complete Poems and Fragments, ii:The Manuscripts and
Fragments, ed. Jon Stallworthy (London: Chatto & Windus, Hogarth Press, and Oxford University
Press, 1983), 538–40; Owen to Leslie Gunston, 22 Aug. 1917, inCollected Letters, 485.
(^37) Ray Monk,Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude(London: Jonathan Cape, 1996), 450.
(^38) Owen,Complete Poems and Fragments, ii. 299.
(^39) Owen, ‘The Dead-Beat’, inThe Complete Poems and Fragments,i:The Poems, ed. Jon Stallworthy
(London: Chatto & Windus, Hogarth Press, and Oxford University Press, 1983), 144.