164 chapter 5
particular letter from the casualty clearing station in straight lines following
standard issue ruled paper, after suffering the shell blast that would manifest
itself as neurasthenia.^38
Owen arrived at Craiglockhart on June 23, 1917 and met Dr. Brock in his
office for the first time four days later. Brock recognized that Owen was a “dev-
otee” of writing ; in the hospital, his poems took up issues of feet, rhythm,
music, and sound as primary and secondary themes, especially in the war
poems. Three instances show how assignments by Dr. Brock directly influ-
enced Owen to associate survival with his ability to manipulate poetic form,
(metrically, as he had been taught). First, Owen was assigned a report on Out-
look Tower in Edinburgh—a tall medieval house adapted as a center for socio-
logical studies. On July 14, 1917, Owen read the following notes to his doc-
tor: “I perceived that this Tower was a symbol: an Allegory, not a historic
structure but a poetic form. I had supposed it to be a museum, and found it [a]
philosophical poem: when I had stood within its walls an hour I became aware
of a soul, and the continuity of its idea from room to room, and from storey to
storey was an epic.”^39 Owen fuses the spatial allegory of poetic form to the
temporal allegory of narrative structure—an order for wholeness. He acts out
Brock’s desire that the patients participate in the larger community, but
through his reconsideration of poetic form he sees himself as part of a specifi-
cally literary community; indeed, through Owen’s poems we are able to per-
ceive poetic form as a kind of historic structure.
Brock saw the mechanizations of modern war as inherently unnatural and
sought to reunite his patients to their social as well as natural environments.
The land, of course, was Britain, and geographic knowledge—an ability to
map out one’s surroundings, to navigate—was an important part of “recon-
necting to one’s environment” as well. Brock composed an article about the
Anteaus myth for The Hydra, noting how “His story is the justification of our
activities. When we come here the first thing we do is to get on our legs
again. . . . Thus we come “back to the land” in the most literal, as well as the
more metaphorical sense.”^40 Like Owen’s assignment to write about Outlook
Tower, Brock saw Owen’s concern with poetic form as one way that the neuras-
thenic soldier could reorder his understanding of himself in time and in the
larger context of English writers. Owen simultaneously worked on a presenta-
tion for the newly created “Field Club” at the hospital and on his second literary
assignment for Dr. Brock, the composition of a poem about the Anteaus myth.^41
Owen approached the composition of his Anteaus poem as a spatial prob-
lem. He wrote to his mother, “On the Hercules-Anteaus Subject — there are
only 3 or 4 lines in the Dictionary. So I shall just do a Sonnet.”^42 By the time he
wrote to his cousin Leslie Gunston a few days later, the poetic form progressed
from the two stanzas or two rooms of a sonnet to a larger blank verse epic, or
what Owen calls “a strong bit of Blank.” This lengthening of form from finite
to continuous in both the Outlook Tower essay and the Anteaus fragment