wilfred owen If it is hard to conceive of an adult today first opening Owen, it is not because
suchadults must have been persistent truants, but because this implies an unlikely
innocence, the kind that Philip Larkin imagined was last to be seen in ranks of
soberly dressed volunteerscircaMCMXIV. The kinds of shock that Owen’s poems
can deliver today are connected with their construction of what Jahan Ramazani calls
a ‘guilty’ audience.^15 This, I take it, is the undercurrent of Ted Hughes’s Sassoonian
homage (a rewriting of ‘Blighters’) to Owen’s political authority. ‘Wilfred Owen’s
Photographs’ is about ostensive definition; hence it is a poem which resigns itself to
the triumph of presence, sight, and touch over verbal signs. The poem describes a
Commons debate hostile to legislation to abolish the cat-o’-nine-tails. But then the
object in question is produced: ‘Whereupon...quietly, unopposed,|The motion
was passed.’^16 The guilty audience never includes us: Hughes’s poem invites us
to imagine brandishing Owen’s verse, ‘like the cat’, at bearers of the ‘old school
tie’ (often associated with the ‘old lie’), a scenario that may indeed be more
palatable than serving him up to children who can barely fix their own tie knots.
The relationship Hughes sets up between poem and photograph resonates with
the curious status of Owen’s poems as artefact and witness, as verbal structures
contrived to please with forms and fictions, and to disturb with gruesome rhythms
and depictions.
Wilfred Owen’s photographs are the ones recalled by Edinburgh University
librarian Frank Nicholson, in a short memoir appended to Edmund Blunden’s
1931 edition of the poems:
It was really the only occasion on which he had an opportunity of speaking freely to me,
and it was then that I got a hint of the effect that the horrors he had seen and heard of at
the Front had made upon him. He did not enlarge upon them, but they were obviously
always in his thoughts, and he wished that an obtuse world should be made sensible
of them. With this object he was collecting a set of photographs exhibiting the ravages
of war upon the men who took part in it—mutilations, wounds, surgical operations,
and the like. He had some of these photographs with him, and I remember that he put
his hand to his breast-pocket to show me them, but suddenly thought better of it and
refrained.^17
Owen’s first biographer, Jon Stallworthy, glosses Owen’s second thoughts in a way
that reminds us of the curse of bellophilia in Philip Caputo’s memoir: ‘his friend
had no need of that particular lesson in reality’.^18 Nicholson, however, was loath
to assert that modern ideological identity with the poet, noting that while ‘perhaps’
(^15) Jahan Ramazani,Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney(Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994), 81. 16
Ted Hughes, ‘Wilfred Owen’s Photographs’, inThe Collected Poems, ed. Paul Keegan (London:
Faber, 2003), 79.
(^17) Frank Nicholson, ‘Memoir’, inThe Poems of Wilfred Owen, ed. Edmund Blunden (London:
Chatto & Windus, 1933), 134. 18
Jon Stallworthy,Wilfred Owen(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 222.