178 chapter 5
struggle with his craft. His early reception was influenced by the soldier-po-
etry fatigue of many poetry readers and the assumption that poetry about the
war participated in the military metrical complex. Sassoon’s reception avoided
this fate because of his journalistic, ironic swagger and his blatant critique of
the war. Owen’s latent critique was metrical, experimental, and reeducated
readers, just as he had been reeducated, to be suspicious of the forms and or-
ders that profess to protect.
Early reviews gingerly avoid mentioning the immeasurable distance from
front line to newsroom and focus squarely on the formal distance created by
pararhyme, which Owen only used in a handful of poems. The Daily News re-
ports “the thing confessed ha[s] not quite been fused with the music of the
confession. Owen was experimenting with words and with strange consonan-
tal rhymes: when he died, he had not yet arrived at mastery.”^59 Critics were
dismayed by his “curious” and “slightly irregular system of consonantal iden-
tity in place of rhyme.” Though some reviewers called his rhymes “highly origi-
nal experiments,” most were not impressed, calling them mere “onomatopoeic
trick[s].” Though Owen’s poems stood out as unique and sensitive among the
deluge of generally unoriginal soldier poetry, his experimental technique
seemed inappropriately alienating. A Times Literary Supplement reviewer
summarizes:
The intention is to chastise our sensibility . . . to shake us and wake us, as
has been done not infrequently through certain alliterative devices, reg-
ularly, indeed, in the old Saxon metres. But our ear now being tuned to
vowel-rhyme, the poet avails himself of our disappointment to increase
the biting severity of his strokes; and so, profiting not only by what he
gives but by what he withholds, he gets an effect of total desolation.^60Like the reviews of Sassoon, many of the reviews of Owen’s poetry found the
lack of perfect rhyme in to be alienating rather than comforting ; they did not
meet the expectations of the war poem, nor did they participate openly in the
expected metrical project. Only John Middleton Murry acknowledged, in
1921: “those assonant endings are indeed the discovery of genius.” Murry can’t
quite bring himself to name Owen’s line endings “rhyme,” but he also does not
call them dissonant—Murry thus exchanges the potential disapproval for dis-
sonant rhymes with approval for “assonance”—a positive term for Owen’s ge-
nius invention. In his discussion of “Strange Meeting,” Murry writes: “The
reader who comes fresh to this great poem does not immediately observe the
assonant endings. At first he feels only that the blank verse has a mournful,
impressive, even oppressive, quality of its own; that the poem has a forged
unity. . . . The emotion with which it is charged cannot be escaped; the mean-
ing of the words and the beat of the sounds have the same indivisible
message.”^61