mark rawlinson
began one of the earliest appreciations of Owen’s poetry, a review of the 1920
Poems,with an acknowledgement of their estranging qualities: ‘I still remember the
incredible shock of that encounter.’^10 James Fenton, eighty years later, revelling
in the easy targets provided by the poet’s juvenilia, reports instead the impact of
Owen-the-war-poet’s reversions to the borrowed idioms of ‘Poesy’, which attest
to the ‘oddity and uncertainty of the poet’s development’: ‘Owen only shocks me
[by] wilful nippings-back in style.’^11 Owen has become so familiar that he unsettles
when he is himself and not his public image.
But to show signs of being disturbed or prostrated by Owen’s poetry perhaps
risks being mistaken for a jingo. Vietnam veteran Philip Caputo’s memoir speaks
on one level of the failure of Owen’s warning, his goal of weaning future generations
off the bellicist illusion:
After I came home from the war, I was often asked how it felt, going into combat for the
first time. I never answered truthfully, afraid that people would think of me as some sort of
war-lover. The truth is I felt happy....I had read all the serious books to come out of the
World Wars, and Wilfred Owen’s poetry about the Western Front. And yet, I had learned
nothing.^12
But this passage is also eloquent about the stigma of appearing to be a ‘war-lover’,
and a desire to present a mind clean of militaristic fetishes, a form of political
correctness that can explain some misreadings of Owen’s work.
It is now normal for English schoolchildren to read Owen and selected con-
temporaries in secondary school, some time between the age of 11 and 18. In a
‘firmly pacifist’ analysis of the literature with which teachers might challenge the
idealization of war and violence, Winifred Whitehead writes that children should be
introduced to books which ‘firmly counter ‘‘the old lie’’ ’. War poetry is efficacious
in anti-war pedagogy, its ‘freshness of experience’ given added resonance by the
‘poignancy’ of authorial death.^13 It is deemed meet that schoolchildren should
be confronted with ‘the horror of war’, though it remains unclear whether war
sweetens the study of poetry, or vice versa. Owen himself precedes us in this respect,
though as paternalistic elder brother rather than poet: ‘I deliberately tell you all
this to educate you to the actualities of war,’ he wrote to Harold Owen about the
sketches of war wounds he sent from his employers’ villa in the Pyrenees two years
and more before he went up to the line in an altogether different part of France, the
British sector of the Western Front.^14
(^10) John Middleton Murry, ‘The Poet of the War’,The Nation and Athenaeum, 28/21 (19 Feb. 1921),
705.
(^11) James Fenton,The Strength of Poetry(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 38.
(^12) Philip Caputo,A Rumor of War(London: Arrow, 1982), 81.
(^13) Winifred Whitehead,Old Lies Revisited: Young Readers and the Literature of War and Violence
(London: Pluto, 1991), 70.
(^14) Wilfred Owen to Harold Owen, 23 Sept. 1914, inCollected Letters, ed. Harold Owen and John
Bell (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 285.