job to dispense. Owen’s sense of distortion turns out to be within the
beauty itself, rather than in opposition to it.
If Owen refused to remove a notion of beauty, however comprom-
ised, from his own war poetry, it would be mistaken to assume that his
famous statement in the ‘Preface’ that ‘above all I am not concerned
with Poetry’ implies a wholesale rejection of the aesthetic. Nevertheless,
placed alongside ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, the Preface has often been
read as the moment where Owen rejects his Keatsian and Aestheticist
heritage for a poetry that refuses to prettify war, which will tell the raw,
direct and uncensored truth.^8 But one of the most obvious, perhaps too
obvious,characteristicsofOwen’spoetryisthatitispatentlyvery
concernedwithpoetryaswellaswar.Therehasbeensurprisinglylittle
discussion of the evident mismatchbetween his incredible sound-tex-
turing, alliteration, internal rhyme, loading every rift with ore, and the
raw, bleeding subject matter, loading every rift with gore, as it were. It is
not enough to say that Owen’s technique simply emphasises the con-
tent, since it emphasises itself, too; as Craig A. Hamilton has demon-
strated, his complex revisions of ‘Strange Meeting’ and ‘Anthem for
Doomed Youth’ always choose a new word as much for the tightening of
the sound-patterns as for his poetic argument.^9 Hence a line such as
‘found peace where shell-storms spouted reddest spate’ literally spits out
the ‘sp’ and ‘st’ of ‘storm’, ‘reddest’, ‘spout’, ‘spate’, in plosive floods of
mud or blood; but also feels deliberate, worked-at, well wrought, as if
Owen were calmly but intensely working his effects to the maximum.
The strangeness of ‘Apologia’ is not only in its riot of beauty and horror,
the violently incompatible in a phrase, but in the organised, dedicated
execution of such a riot. In a war that popularised the notion of the
unconscious, Owen’s lush, Keatsian horror ishyper-conscious, almost
every word bound together with another. ‘These men are worth / Your
tears. You are not worth their merriment’ insists the last stanza, and
Owen seems to be stabbing at his audience like Sassoon does, but that
final ‘merriment’ describes the soldiers’ mood and simultaneously
echoes ‘these men’ and earlier, ‘merry it was to laugh there’. The word
itself is knit into the poem’s sound-texture, and relating merriment to
the absurd laughter of ‘merry’ as themen ‘murder’ other soldiers cuts
against the supposed oppositions of tears/merriment and superior
troops/unworthy civilians that the poem has been setting up. Owen’s
aesthetic relentlessly binds up incompatible feelings, attitudes and emo-
tions, and does so because the bindingin itselfsets up an impossible
188 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism