mark rawlinson
on Rupert Brooke and I. A. Richards when he characterized the impact of Owen’s
workas ‘a sense of release, as from some clogging mental medium into a cleaner
and more firmly grasped state of mind’.^70 ) The violence of combat—barrage, small
arms, hand-to-hand engagement—is presented with a significant variant of Owen’s
iconography of weaponry, making the soldier’s body the object of sacrifice and
transubstantiation. Whereas the earth is rent, bodies are put into motion, ‘went
up’ or ‘plunged and fell away’. They are not torn, and their blood is cupped. As
they ‘breast’ the ‘surf of bullets’, these soldiers may recall the leaping swimmers in
Brooke’s sonnet ‘Peace’, but they are closer to the Innocents of Yeats’s ‘News for
the Delphic Oracle’, or indeed the bodies, poised between elation in nakedness and
vulnerability to harm, in F. T. Prince’s Second World War poem ‘Soldiers Bathing’
(set on one of Scarborough’s beaches).
Owen’s protest was succeeded by a phase of creation, of which the burden was
no longer the urgent need to communicate knowledge but instead a concern to find
adequate emblems for the ‘inwardness of war’ which cannot be broadcast. In this he
was abetted by his youthful investment in Romantic myths of oracular inspiration,
a device that resurfaces in his later poems as a form for revealing that which must
remain outside the ken of mortals.
His draft of a preface for his war poems (composed around May 1918) reveals
unease with the direction his writing had taken. It draws on the language of ‘Strange
Meeting’ (as well as that of William Wordsworth’s Preface toLyrical Ballads)to
distance his work from the very poetic mythology that that poem renews, and this
is part of the reason for its verbal familiarity. The visual cohesion of letterpress
invites us to collude in supplying logical relations amongst Owen’s notes, but this
is to gloss over significant aporia which are the traces of Owen’s argument with
himself, rather than his argument with warmongers.^71 To paraphrase, with Owen’s
cancellations in square brackets, and my commentary in round ones: the poet
doesn’t write about heroes (because) English poetry is ‘not yet fit’ to speak of
heroes. The volume is about War, but not concepts of war: [‘battle’], glory, honour,
and so on (the implication here seems to be that the category of heroes, by contrast,
is non-idealizing). All this is secondary to the poet’s abjuring Poetry (if poetry is not
yet fit to speak of heroes, some other idiom must be employed). Even if Poetry is
impossible, there is still a task for the poet. His subject is war (and nothing but war)
and the pity of war. (Because the poet is not concerned with poetry, and the reader
cannot be expected to ignore all evidence of the senses) what poetry there is must
be in the pity of war. These elegies (‘English Elegies’ was a provisional title) will not
console his [‘a bereaved’] generation, but they may console the next generation.
Today’s poets can only warn (an address to the future), therefore [‘War’] Poets
(^70) I. M. Parsons, ‘The Poems of Wilfred Owen’,The Criterion, 10/41 (July 1931), 660.
(^71) Jon Stallworthy transcribes Owen’s draft preface, with its excisions and variant readings, inThe
Complete Poems and Fragments, ii. 535–6.