mark rawlinson
Owen thought ‘such methods of propaganda were superfluous in my case’, ‘no
doubthe felt the sight of them would be painful to me’.^19
Owen’s urge to assault the senses of the ‘obtuse’ with graphic renditions of
hurt here precedes the poems which would become culturally acceptable forms of
hurtful confrontation (an offensive interaction sometimes crudely dramatized in
Sassoon’s sonnets, like ‘The Glory of Women’). If poetry served political protest
against the war, because it could get past the censors, it also gets past another
kind of censorship, which is more readily offended by graphic images of physical
trauma, as both sources of disgust and of (disgusting) pleasure. (By analogy, we
might compare the reception of a notoriousGuardianfront-page photograph of
the charred corpse of an Iraqi tank commander from the First Gulf War, with that
of Tony Harrison’s poem on this image, ‘A Cold Coming’.^20 )
The conundrum of Owen’s status as poet is compounded by something akin to
but not quite the guilty paradox of ‘saccharined...death’ which Seamus Heaney
unearths in reassessing his poetry of the Troubles in ‘Station Island’.^21 With Owen
it is a question of the persistence with whichreaders and critics have read against the
grain and insisted on excluding the aesthetic, except where it can be reinscribed as
history, in line with Louis MacNeice’s notion of an ‘impure poetry...conditioned
by the poet’s life’.^22
Owen Makes Himself a War Poet
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••A further issue in evaluating Owen is the posthumousness of his public literary
career. From this point of view, he is identical with his reception and publication
histories, not differentiated from them and the uses to which he has been put (as
in the case of Keats or Bob Dylan). Notably, the poet was revealed to his growing
public in a process which reversed his poetic development, a factor which has
perhaps given renewed life to the legend of the poet made by the war, which his
early death helped to cement. In his lifetime, Owen published four poems: ‘Song of
Songs’, an exercise in pararhyme which did not refer to the war (first inThe Hydra,
the Craiglockhart journal that Owen edited, then as a competition runner-up inThe
Bookman), ‘Miners’, ‘Hospital Barge’, and ‘Futility’ (all inThe Nationduring 1918).
(^19) Nicholson, ‘Memoir’, 134–5.
(^20) Kenneth Jarecke’s photograph inThe Guardian, 18 Mar. 1991, 1. On the first day of the ‘War, Art
and Medicine’ conference, University College London/National Portrait Gallery, Oct. 2002, similar
unease was evident in discussion following the publicreproduction of the pastel sketches of the torn
faces of servicemen made by Henry Tonks for the Great War plastic surgeon Harold Gillies at Queens
Hospital Sidcup.
(^21) Seamus Heaney, ‘Station Island’, inOpened Ground: Poems 1966–1996(London: Faber, 1998),
261.
(^22) Louis MacNeice,Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 79.