the poetry of pain and his short lyrics, with their vivid moments of access to both bodies and psyches
rippedby war, have reverberated with readers throughout the century. If Owen
became a favourite of 1930s English poets, and later influenced generations of war
writers, this reclamation in part stemmed from an attraction to the sound, echoing
throughout his work, of the hurt human being. Indeed, as one departs from the
realm of Owen’s work, or even the broader category of combatant poetry, one
finds among many civilian poets a persistent reckoning with the felt experience of
modern war, as the effort to make known war’s pains has taken on a sense of cultural
urgency, and the panoply of voices contributing to that project has expanded and
diversified.
In what follows, I propose to delineate several shared points among an array of
British war poems, aiming to shed light, above all, on one salient feature: the searing
pain that cuts through war verse. I am not attempting, in this essay, to provide a
study of the many rich contexts for this poetry—personal, historical, and cultural
forces that powerfully contributed to the development of war poetics—but to offer,
instead, an overarching discussion of some of the shared motifs and principles
traversing a spectrum of war poetry. It may be impossible to historicize pain; but we
can trace its poetic forms, and this is my interest here.^6 Elaine Scarry has famously
made the case for a profound barrier dividing the realm of pain, which silences,
from that of language, which speaks. As she writes inThe Body in Pain:
[O]ne of two things is true of pain. Either it remains inarticulate or else the moment it first
becomes articulate it silences all else: the moment language bodies forth the reality of pain, it
makes all further statements and interpretations seem ludicrous and inappropriate....But
the result of this is that the moment it is lifted out of the ironclad privacy of the body into
speech, it immediately falls back in. Nothing sustains its image in the world; nothing alerts
us to the place it has vacated.^7
Scarry’s central paradox is a structural one: the body in pain entails a fundamental
inexpressibility, and to change that situation, if such is even possible, requires a
large-scale commitment to constructing forms of language appropriate to pain,
and devoted to its alleviation.^8 Yet, for all the haunting brilliance of Scarry’s claim
about pain’s inarticulacy, literature has, in fact, developed strategies and forms
(^6) A word on methodology: this essay is written in a reflective spirit; it is literary-historical in both
tone and aims, tending to draw connections among disparate writers, historical periods, and, to some
degree, national affiliations. I draw especially heavily fromFirst World War poetry, in part because of
my own familiarity with that material, in part because it wasthat body of verse which in many ways set
the stage for later war poets of the century. Finally, in keeping with the structure of this collection, I
have focused primarily on English, and some Irish, war poems, though I have also included discussion
of several American works.
(^7) Elaine Scarry,The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World(Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1985), 60. 8
Such a commitment would involve vital changes in consciousness which might be registered, e.g.
in terms of medical advances, changed cultural standards for war, and a revised understanding of the
structure of torture.