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cough, curse, turn, trudge, limp on, fit, choke, smother, pace, gargle, not tell—
though the poem’s form recovers from its own chaotic center to show the ne-
cessity of telling, and the bittersweet triumph of steady, controlled pacing as
the only possible method for that telling. The second sonnet’s accusation is
also its central opposition: “If you too could pace . . . you would not tell.” That
is, substituting “pacing” for “hearing,” we can read the lurking hysteria in the
middle of the poem both literally and allegorically—as an anxiety about the
way that pacing and time significantly prevent the poem from “telling” its own
formal absurdities, and as an anxiety from the figure of the writer as choking
soldier, witnessing his own inability to tell, pace, measure, or order
experience.
Owen died before he could fashion his own poetic monument, and his
critical legacy has been shaped and reshaped by critics who see his progression
as either Georgian (a Romantic pastoral legacy) or temporally modern.
Within the context of Craiglockhart, we can read Owen’s later poems as par-
tial products of therapy that reeducated its patients to recognize and confront
their hysteria, reordering its reception in the mind through a reconnection to
the physical and social world. Meter’s place in that particular microcosm was
at times allegorical, at times literal, but almost always empowering. This coun-
terpoint—in which deliberate and measured language is at once an exercise in
recovery from modernity’s chaos as well as a constant reminder of the tyran-
nies of historical order that led to formal rupture in the first place—serves as
an important double movement for famous war writers such as Owen, as well
as for the thousands of soldier-poets whose names did not find their way into
the canon.
The Kindred Points of Heaven and Home
Outside a few scattered reviews, Owen was not considered a great poet by the
general reading public until the publication of the 1931 Selected Poems, edited
by Edmund Blunden. Even after this reprinted edition, Owen was still classi-
fied as a “war poet.” Blunden’s edition was reprinted nine times before C. Day
Lewis’s expanded edition was published in 1963. In contrast, the first edition
of Owen’s poems, edited by Siegfried Sassoon (with the help of Edith Sitwell,
who had published Owen’s poems in her anti-Georgian journal, Wheels), sold
only 730 copies in the eleven years following its publication. Despite the rela-
tive success of the 1931 edition, however, W. B. Yeats famously refused to in-
clude Owen in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892–1935:
I have a distaste for certain poems written in the midst of the great war;
they are in all anthologies. . . . The writers of these poems were invari-
ably officers of exceptional courage and capacity, one a man constantly
selected for dangerous work, all, I think, had the Military Cross; their