conflation of aesthetic enjoyment and disgust, the artificial and the
direct. ‘Insensibility’ dramatises the conflict:
The front line withers.
But they are troops who fade, not flowers,
For poets’ tearful fooling:
Men, gaps for filling.It is as if Owen reacts angrily to his own metaphor of ‘withers’ – how
can you compare or translate suffering into a poem? – but then again, it is
the poets’ tears that make him not insensible, and the poetry is still
fooling around with pararhyme as it berates poets, and moreover is
written in free verse so that thereareno pre-prescribed ‘gaps for filling’
with men or words about them, and the subject makes its own form. It is
a poem equally sincere about writing poetry and not writing ‘poetry’.
This sincerity, even a sincerity about irony, is why Owen, for all his
multiple voices, cannot be recruited for Eliot’s impersonal version of
modernism.^10 Eliot delicately plays off voices against one another, and
cannot be identified with any of them. Owen writes with an excess of
formal patterning which only emphasises his divided allegiances, but he is
equally sincere about all of them. Surely the survival of the unconfirmed
story that Owen used to go up to people in the street and show them
photographs of mangled corpses is precisely because that is what Owen
poems do to their readers – thrust corpses in their face, to make themsee.
Yet at the same time, these are, as it were, carefully photographed corpses
with maximum lighting effects and perhaps in a studio, rather than
snapshots taken on the hoof, with all the post-Romantic virtues of
involuntariness, uncomposedness and therefore ‘reality’. Owen himself
described his reworkings of ‘A Terre’ as ‘retouching a “photographic
representation” of an officer dying of wounds’.^11 His work insists simul-
taneously on the real, the incredibly real, with an aesthetic of touching-
up, hyper-composure and excess. He has too many identifications, too
much aesthetic interest for any definition of war poetry which defines its
distinctiveness in terms of objective ‘realism’.
Seamus Heaney has sensitively explored the dilemma this puts the
reader of the poems into. He begins by noting the difficulty of paying
attention to Owen’s aesthetics at all, since ‘his poems have the potency of
human testimony, of martyr’s relics, so that any intrusion of the aesthetic
can feel like impropriety’. But nevertheless, Heaney’s poetic conscience
persists in asking awkward questions about famous poems, albeit guiltily:
The passions of Wilfred Owen 189