wilfred owen At the same time Owen was planning a collection entitled ‘Disabled and Other
Poems’.From April, in a cottage in Ripon acquired for the purpose, until June,
when, boarded fit for active service, he was posted back to his unit, he revised all the
war poems he had written since the previous summer, and composed a dozen new
ones, including ‘Strange Meeting’, ‘Mental Cases’, and ‘Futility’. Notwithstanding
plans for a writing life after the Army, the sequence in Stallworthy’s edition
underlines Owen’s immediate efforts to determine a publishable state for his war
poems in the spring of 1918.
‘Disabled and Other Poems’:
The Architecture of Owen’s Poetry
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Stephen Spender registered the freshness and strangeness of Owen before he became
familiar, attributing to him a ‘deeper human understanding’ than to the ‘aristocratic’
Yeats, and making him a touchstone of ‘pity for human suffering’ by which we
might place the early Eliot; but, most interestingly, he characterized Owen’sœuvre
(in Blunden’s edition) by its heterogeneity. There is a conception of a ‘whole edifice’
in Owen’s plans for ‘Disabled and Other Poems’, but Spender was obliged to note
‘how very different all his poems are from each other. Each poem takes an entirely
different aspect of this war, centred always in some incident, and builds round it.’^32
How much more serviceable is this appreciation of the emotional, rhetorical, and
intellectual angularity of Owen’s writing than the innocence to experience model
of the Great War and its cultural impact, a model that flatters those born into
hindsight, and flattens concrete experience.
Before he sought out the poems inThe Old Huntsman, Owen knew Siegfried
Sassoon, who was sent to Craiglockhart in July 1917, as the author of a ‘too
plain-spoken’ letter to the ‘Higher Command’ (the text published inThe Times
that month as ‘A Soldier’s Declaration’ is commonly known, in a tacit analogy with
Luther’s theses on Church corruption, as ‘Sassoon’s Protest’).^33 Sassoon studiously
dissociated himself from a critique of tactics andstrategy (of the kind characteristic
of post-war excoriations of staff incompetence from Basil Liddell Hart to Alan
Clark and beyond):
I am not protesting against the military conduct of the War, but against the political errors
and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.
On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which
is being practised on them. Also I believe that it may help to destroy the callous complacence
(^32) Stephen Spender,The Destructive Element: A Study of Modern Writers and Beliefs(London:
Jonathan Cape, 1935), 219. 33
Owen to Susan Owen, 15 Aug. 1917, inCollected Letters, 485.