british poetry in the age of modernism

extraordinary style, for the remarkable division between the form of his
poems and their content is a protest against and a symptom of his personal
divisions, in the psychoanalytic sense; a compromise-formation designed
to ensure his psychic survival. It is also a direct challenge to the Romantic
and modernist tradition of autonomous aesthetics discussed in chapter 1 ,
for where Pound and Eliot campaigned for the elimination of excess,
artificiality and the generic, Owen’s poetry displays them flagrantly, as
qualities he must hang onto for dear life. In a situation that was the opposite
of autonomous, no version of aesthetics derived from that principle would
ever allow him to do that situation justice, or better, render its total lack of
justice palpable. The very incompatibilities within his poems are less to be
lamented, aesthetically or morally, than recognised as somehow necessary,
since the force of his protest derives from their split.

divided loyalties

Nevertheless, Owen’s poetic is not entirely opposed to Eliot’s fundamen-
tal aim in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, to shift the question of
poetic agency away from the poet’s originating self. For although Owen’s
work is testimony to his own situation, that situation itself involves some
intense contradictions of loyalty which make his voice more divided than
singular. Owen’s poetry is about the war, but it is made by someone
within the war and its system, and one of the system’s characteristics is to
create a disjunction between what the man is and what the soldier does – a
disjunction which honour, loyalty and comradeship do their best to
overcome. In a war, a soldier will win medals for actions which in
peace-time would put him in prison. He is a guilty hero and an innocent
murderer, committing terrible acts for which he is, and is not, responsible.
The army is therefore what makes him break the most primary social laws,
and gives him an alternative society of shared loyalties to substitute for the
civilian ones that have been broken. This question of agency was, of
course, rendered particularly acute for the First World War because of
its felt absence for most soldiers, conscripted and then pinned down in
trench warfare.
What Owen felt, then, was dependent not only on what he did, but
what he became, or was made to become. Such a question occurs at the
heart of his most famous protest, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, where he
describes a file of stumbling soldiers who ‘limped on, blood-shod’. Their
feet are covered with blood because ‘many had lost their boots’, but the
blood may not be all their own: the phrase cannot but recall tyrants

184 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism