war poetry and the realm of the senses soldiers themselves. ‘Exposure’, partly because it is based on real-life experience,
powerfullybears witness to a central conflict that runs throughout Owen’s verse:
the relation between a sensuous, masochistic imagination and his responsibility
as a war poet. This constant tension makes his poetry fascinating—linguistically,
psychologically, as well as historically—but at the same time ethically disturbing,
defying attempts at any consistent, progressive political reading.
‘An experience’, Foucault notes, ‘is, of course, something one has alone; but
it cannot have its full impact unless the individual manages to escape from pure
subjectivity in such a way that others can I won’t say re-experience exactly—but at
least cross paths with it or retrace it.’^55 The process seems to be partly bared in the
origin and composition of ‘Spring Offensive’—his last poem—as Owen draws our
attention to ‘the very limits of limit experience’.^56 Two letters are helpful in this
context. In a letter written to his brother Colin, Owen recounts the assault at Savy
Wood in April 1917 on which ‘Spring Offensive’ is loosely based, describing the
‘extraordinary exultation in the act of slowly walking forward, showing ourselves
openly’:
Then we were caught in a Tornado of Shells. The various ‘waves’ were all broken up....
When I looked back and saw the ground all crawling and wormy with wounded bodies, I
felt no horror at all but only immense exultation at having got through the Barrage.^57
A second letter, written to his mother after the composition of ‘Spring Offensive’,
is also illuminating: ‘I can find no word to qualify my experiences except the
wordsheer.... I lost all earthly faculties, and fought like an angel.’^58 The fitting
of such extreme experience into verse and wresting order out of chaos must
require a monumental effort. The manuscript version is one of the most rewritten
and illegible of all his papers, particularly the extraordinarily compacted stanza
describing the actual offensive:
GloriousLightly So,soon raced
Proudly went
Splendid,Bright−faced ran
Turning, they topped the hill, andwalked together
Down stretchgreenherbs
Over an openplain ofwind and heather
Exposed.And instantly the whole sky burned
set sudden cups
andc[?] and
set[?] and(^55) MichelFoucault, ‘How an‘‘Experience-Book is Born’’ ’, inRemarks on Marx: Conversations with
Duccio Trombadori, trans. R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito (New York: Semiotext(e),1991), 40.
(^56) Martin Jay, ‘The Limits of Limit-Experience: Bataille and Foucault’, inCultural Semantics:
Keywords of Our Time 57 (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 62.
58 Owen to Colin Owen, 14 May 1917, inCollected Letters, 458.
Owen to Susan Owen, 4/5 Oct. 1918, ibid. 580.