the poetry of pain a kind of army in support of the poet, a disfigured and terrifying community in
angrydefiance, with its own revolution in mind.
At the basis of that revolution is pain. The slain in ‘To the Warmongers’ are
‘tormented’, their limbs twist like infernal bodies, and their voices—the very crux
of protest—‘moan out their brutish pain’. The idea that pain might be an activating
rather than debilitating condition is a startling and important one, and it brings us
back to where we began, with Owen’s imperative to write a poetry with deep roots
in the suffering body. If ‘The Poet in Pain’ provided one version of the theory of
the ‘speaking wound’, we now encounter a wound that shouts, where the need to
witness has modulated into a more focused desire to effect political change. Modern
war poetry might be said to operate along this spectrum, from articulating pain as
a shuddering cry to articulating pain as a defiant provocation. In both cases, we
seem to have migrated far from Homer, for whom war ultimately belonged to the
sphere of cultural achievement, a showcasing of what is triumphant in the human
realm; for twentieth-century war literature, by contrast, war belongs to the sphere
of cultural destruction, a showcasing of what has failed in modern civilization. Yet
are these divergences as great as they seem? What I have attempted to show in this
essay is that the intertwined elements of anger, grief, rest, and force in theIliad
also help to organize later war poetry; but when they are reborn in the lyrics that
document warfare in the twentieth century, they become attached to a poetics of
pain. It is that function, more than the content of war as it is expressed in these
works, that generates their political sting. To speak from and for a position of pain
is to challenge all that is comfortable, stable, and ordinary. Yet, as Owen wrote in
‘Miners’, a poem that imagines an expanded political context for war’s victims—an
alliance of all those men with ‘muscled bodies charred’ who are the casualties of
industrial modernity—the comfortable world will never be dislodged. A politicized
imperative to sing of pain thus gives way to a sense of futility, an angry voice is
muted back into silence, and those who have been killed in war, or in other violent
endeavours of the modern world, become no more than the elemental stuff of the
earth:
Comforted years will sit soft-chaired,
In rooms of amber;
The years will stretch their hands, well-cheered
By our life’s ember;
The centuries will burn rich loads
With which we groaned,
Whose warmth shall lull their dreaming lids,
While songs are crooned;
But they will not dream of us poor lads,
Left in the ground.^46(^46) Owen, ‘Miners’, inComplete Poems and Fragments, i. 135–6.