162 chapter 5
detachment from both time and space. His thoughts cannot move forward,
nor can his speech. The patient must be reeducated to see himself in time as
part of a continuum, and he must reintegrate into the social world and his sur-
roundings to face all aspects of experience. Brock advises treating the whole
patient, not merely the symptoms: “[T]he far-seeing doctor will not allow the
urgency of the local expression to blind him to the much more important gen-
eral condition (otherwise — if he confines himself to dealing with symptoms
— it will probably be as with the heads of the Hydra — ‘uno avulso, non deficit
alter.’ ”^35 Brock’s treatment methods were also Hydra-like in their efficiency—
highly coordinated and diverse activities at the hospital were Brock’s solution
for treating patient “inco-ordination” (146). The patients’ responsibility to
manage their own time—through an endless array of physical and social ac-
tivities—would, in Brock’s reckoning, force them to actively and metrically
order their mental chaos by virtue of thinking through new contexts of time
(the five-beat line of a poem, a first-person narrative or short-story, a play) and
space (a diagram of the city, a lecture on botany, a description of local museums).
Brock encouraged patients to write metrical poetry but warned against the
dangers of “art for art’s sake,” where art became a kind of drug that separated
the patient from the social world; art for art’s sake could be seen as an extreme
form of outrance. To counter this artistic tendency, artists and writers in the
hospital were encouraged, indeed, required, to “produce beautiful objects of
immediate and practical utility,” with the hopes that Brock could eventually
“orchestrat[e] the work of all our artists towards cooperative programmes of
regional or civil scope.”^36 Objects of art, then, were subject to discipline just
like any other “activity,” though as an exercise, writing was specifically a form
of communication with a larger collective—of other patients, possible patrons
(hospital magazines raised money for the hospital, and patients were charged
for copies), and an imagined community of literary connoisseurs and other
publishing poets.
Meter’s role as part of this connective tissue, hearkening back to prewar
poetic forms, was perhaps the most important aspect of Brock’s therapy for
Owen and other literary-minded patients. The ability to manipulate poetic
language into English poetic form linked these soldier-poets to the larger field
of English writing and of the country in general. In the hospital, even the po-
etic self was part of the collective history of the region and country; not iso-
lated, but participating in his heritage, in the preservation of his own past and
future, and in his own rehabilitation. Learning these tools relied on discipline
and labor; what Brock called “ergo-therapy” reconnected the soldier to the
social and physical world—to the structure and communities of language and
country—from which he had become severed through the unnatural mecha-
nizations of modern warfare.