mark rawlinson
inevitably, and without restraint, we go on to consider it as a stage spectacle,’ wrote
ThomasDe Quincey of the Drury Lane fire.^78 Some of Owen’s poems arraign
non-combatants and readers for their failure of pity, but others discover in war as
a regrettable circumstance the possibility of quite other compensations than those
of Christianity and national or class politics. One way of understanding Owen’s
later work, the poems which are (improperly?) concerned not only with war but
with the possibility of poetic vision, is as pessimism or fatalism—he imagines the
extermination of a generation, and there being no one left except those who deny
anything exceptional is going on—ameliorated by a brotherhood in truth. Insisting
that he is not concerned with poetry, Owen was countering this fatalism with an
optimism of the political will, the logic of his warning. Though, as the draft preface
relates, this will have to wait for the next generation. His was under France.
The next generation would make him a type of the revolutionary leader. Spender,
who claimed Owen to be ‘the most useful influence in modern verse’, elected his
shade to the school of pylon poets: ‘if it had not been the War, it might have
been the industrial towns, and the distressed areas’.^79 And long before Pat Barker
drew on Bell’s edition of theCollected Lettersto create the correspondence of Billy
Prior, the fascinatingly anachronistic subaltern whose fictional life converges on
Owen’s real one in the coda of theRegenerationtrilogy, Auden, the main inheritor
of Owen’s alliterative revival, had used him as a model for his (Fascist) airman,
‘hands in perfect order’, inThe Orators.^80
But as the example of Billy Prior suggests, the refraction of the culture of the
Great War through our own can make the war seem closer than it is. Juliet Barker
recently described the Wordsworths, in 1820, escorted by a veteran to the field of
Waterloo: ‘it was the equivalent of a trip today to the killing-fields of the Somme.’^81
Only 1916 was ninety, not five, years ago (and ‘killing fields’ was not then a
commonplace for Pol Pot’s ruralization and extermination of Cambodians). Our
own complex relationship to war, especially in Britain, which was victor in name, if
little else, in the war that made the Great War only the First, and which put civilians
in the bombardiers’ sights, is a crucial factor in the way we understand Owen and
his contemporaries. The British, unlike the German, French, or Japanese, have
scarcely begun to examine, rather than rehearse, their memory of the Second World
War; while there seemed to be little that the victors would rather have forgotten,
this complacence may have seemed plausible. But the stringency of the values we
attribute to the trench poets (not least issues of political pacifism) is a measure of
(^78) Thomas De Quincey, ‘Postscript’ (1854) to ‘On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts’, in
The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey 79 , xiii, ed. D. Masson (London: A. & C. Black, 1897), 72.
80 Spender,The Destructive Element, 220–1.
Pat Barker,The Ghost Road(London: Viking, 1995), 254; W. H. Auden,The Orators,inThe
English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Writings 1927–1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (London:
Faber, 1977), 94.
(^81) Juliet Barker,Wordsworth: A Life(London: Penguin, 2001), 370.