understood in others, and remains inseparable from the soldier he was.
Illegal desire and death irresistibly combine in a letter to the one person
who might understand this dilemma, Sassoon, where he writes wryly, ‘I
desire no moreexposed flanksof any sort for a long time.’^28 They reoccur
when he reports that officers resent the way women adore him, but ‘the
dramatic irony was too killing’: well, indeed.^29 Owen’s sexuality is part of
the complex of ‘pity’, and ‘pity’ is inseparable from suffering, as well as
from his aesthetics, so that his poems embody the conflict they relate.
That the erotic, the aesthetic and the deadly can run through the same
two or three lines at a time is part of their overall protest, a protest
manifest in the ambiguity in the famous phrase ‘The pity of war; the pity
War distilled’. Pity is the emotion that War concentrates and intensifies
into undreamt-of sympathy, and at the same time that which War distils
off and dissipates, so that no one feels anything. War does both, and the
incompatibilities of feeling in ‘pity’ are not merely a result of the impos-
sible situation that Owen was placed in, which to reconcile was to remove
himself from. They are also partly a response to the terror of ‘Insens-
ibility’, that the war will make Owen the poet unfeeling, when to feel
anythingis to be alive. Owen’s argument against war is, simply, that
feeling pain is a more primary reality than reason, tactics, justice or
metaphysics, and none of them are worth it. Intensity of feeling is
therefore more important than detached discrimination of feelings, and
Owen’s poetry goes over the top, loading on the rhymes, alliterations,
puns, sensuality and horror, because such intense excess insists against
neutrality. This disjunction between lyric form and its content may be
bad aesthetics, and entirely opposed to the unifying, autonomous ideals of
Owen’s modernist contemporaries, but in his case it was indispensable;
for the lurid sentiment with which his work persistently flirts (see ‘A Tear
Song’, composed within weeks of ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’), for the
declaration of the unavowable (love or pain) which that sentiment wit-
nesses to, and for any dealings with the traumatic. While Eliot was
reasserting a poetic that aimed to eliminate any externality in the name
of better emotional discipline, Owen’s poetry would suggest that the truth
of certain feelings might depend on maintaining it.
The passions of Wilfred Owen 199