santanu das
Withfl fury against them;andthateasyslope
earthhell
OpenedTocatchtheirblood In thousands for their blood; and the green slope....^59Thisis a stanza rooted in unthinkable horror, but what the cancelled words—‘splen-
did’, ‘bright faced’, or ‘Glorious Lightly’—as well as the accelerating rhythm of
the run-on line climaxing in ‘Exposed’ convey is the sense of exhilaration that
Owen mentions in the letters. Is the exhilaration a subsequent emotion, contingent
on having survived the offensive? Or is it Owen’s unflinching fidelity to the truth
of bodily sensation, hinting at something that Freud placed at the very heart of
Civilization and Its Discontents(1929): ‘in the blindest fury of destructiveness, we
cannot fail to recognize that the satisfaction of the instinct is accompanied by an
extraordinarily high degree of narcissistic enjoyment.’^60
Owen is the quintessential pacifist poet of the First World War. Yet, the power of
some of his most celebrated lyrics lies neither in realism nor in pity (both of which
nonetheless inform his poetry in abundant measure), but in his sensuous evocation
of certain limit experiences where eros, violence, and sound are combined. Whether
these impulses inform the original experience or its retrospective fictionalization
writtenapres coupis open to debate. But this plunges us headlong into the relation between the aesthetics and ethics of representation: how politically responsible or aware is such poetry that seeks to represent extreme sense experiences and ends up transforming them through its ownjouissance? Is it a problem of a specific historical inheritance—the fin de sieclewhich preceded the war—that inflects both the
vocabulary and the sensibility; or is it endemic to lyric poetry, where the music and
sensuousness put an anodyne over the unrest and the ugliness? Wordsworth noted
that ‘there can be little doubt but that more pathetic situations and sentiments,
that is, those which have a greater proportion of pain connected with them, may
be endured in metrical composition, especially in rhyme, than in prose’.^61 This
partly explains the popularity of Owen and trench poetry more generally—over, for
example, nursing memoirs which often make more depressing reading—but there
is an essential difference. The situations Owen describes are not only ‘pathetic’ but
based on real-life violence, and any extension of Wordworth’s concept of aesthetic
‘pleasure’ must stop short of narrating or understanding historical carnage. Yet,
pleasure is a key element in Owen’s poetry at the semiotic level, which makes it at
once deeply disturbing and affective: the sensuousness which mires it ethically has
also, paradoxically, made it one of the most powerful and effective forms of protest
poetry from the Second World War to Iraq, turning it into an important political
(^59) Owen, ‘Spring Offensive’, inComplete Poems and Fragments, ii. 378.
(^60) Freud,Civilization and Its Discontents,inStandard Edition, xxi. 121. Freud’s observations are
congruent with some of the experiences and emotions that Ernst J ̈unger recalls inStorm of Steel,
and, more recently, with some revisionist accounts of war, as in Niall Ferguson’sThePityofWar
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), which has a section on ‘The Joy of War’, 357–66.
(^61) Wordsworth, ‘Preface toLyrical Ballads’, 610.