thereby gains a peculiar character of its own. Asking what Owen felt about
the war he was fighting in is not such a simple question, because Owen’s
poetry is itself a site of irreconcilable conflicts of feeling, conflicts that
were necessarily irreconcilable if Owen’s protest were to continue. If
tracing what Owen’s poems tell us about the conflicts their author experi-
enced feels like a natural approach, however, placing his work in the
aesthetic context of modernism brings it up straightaway against the
insistence of ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ that the poem’s emotion
is a new thing and important for itself, rather than as a testimony to the
private emotions and situations that provoked it. But in a strange sense, to
put Owen’s emotions and his aesthetics together is to contextualise the
ethos of ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ in return, for so many of its
aesthetic ideals were the realities of Owen’s personal experience; the imper-
sonal discipline and anonymity of the army, the simultaneous present of
the living and the dead, and the real, bloody fragmentations of his front-
line experiences. When Eliot remarks that his essay’s aim is to attack the
metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul, the most biograph-
ical reading possible of Owen’s poetry will confirm that this attack was a
daily reality, in the trenches and among the traumatised and incapacitated
at Craiglockhart mental hospital. As Allyson Booth and Trudi Tate have
explored, many of the splintered, haunted and traumatised ‘perceptual
habits’ of the First World War soldier are also those of the modernist work
of art.^2 But it is because ‘continual self-sacrifice’ was rather more than a
doctrine of artistic progress for Owen that it is possible to trace in his
aesthetics a very different set of needs and ideals from Eliot’s, because they
are part of Owen’s active struggle against the war he was fighting, rather than
just a cultural adaptation of the war’s collective trauma. Jane Goldman has
made a neat comparison between the ideals of ‘Tradition and the Individual
Talent’ and the emphasis on anonymous self-sacrifice displayed in the
Cenotaph and other war memorials then being established in every village;
like the unknown soldier, the writer gives up his personal existence for the
sake of the greater good of the whole.^3 But memorials are for the dead, and
Owen was not yet one of them; against Eliot’s ‘surrender’ of emotion to a
greater order, his extraordinary poems were provoked by his struggle to
hold on to his feelings in the face of his contrary and impossible situation.
As a soldier he was torn between hatred of the war and embroilment in it; as
an artist, between telling the truth and dealing with the unbearable; and as a
gay man, between his unlawfully tender feelings for his fellow soldiers and
the officially sanctioned killing that always framed the possibility of such
intimacy. Above all, such conflicts of feeling are inseparable from Owen’s
The passions of Wilfred Owen 183