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THE POETRY
OF PAIN
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About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters...
W. H. Auden, ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’ ́Does suffering have a voice? Wilfred Owen wrote, from somewhere on the Western
Front in 1917, that it is the poet’s business to express the pain of his own hurting
body, a palsied rhythm set ‘to music of the world’s eternal wail’: ‘If’, he postulates
in ‘The Poet in Pain’, ‘my remorseless ache|Be needful to proof-test upon my
flesh|The thoughts I think, and in words bleeding-fresh|Teach me for speechless
sufferers to plain,|I would not quench it.’^1 One could almost say that Owen revels
in pain in these lines, for the driving imperative of his verse—‘for speechless
sufferers to plain’—seems to demand such empathetic struggle. Indeed, the poem
makes an urgent statement about the way in which the poet’s own suffering and the
success of his poetry sustain one another, proclaiming all at once that the world’s
eternal wail (here war) represents a constant strain throughout history; that war
generates forms of agony which deprive its participants of language; that the poet
works to articulate in words the primal groan of a world in crisis; and that to
create an artefact which can somehow crash through the culture’s wall of silence
and ignorance relies on the writer’s own willingness to feel pain. Trauma, as Cathy
Caruth has postulated in her influential studyUnclaimed Experience, ‘is always the
story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality
(^1) Wilfred Owen, ‘The Poet in Pain’, inThe Complete Poems and Fragments,i:The Poems,ed.Jon
Stallworthy (London: Chatto & Windus, Hogarth Press, and Oxford University Press, 1983), 111.