mark rawlinson
The devices of ‘Inspection’ (a private soldier’s projection of ‘Field Marshall
God’)^44 and‘The Last Laugh’, which reprises the choric ordnance of ‘Anthem
for Doomed Youth’ to mock the last words of the dying (‘the Gas hissed’)^45 are
associated by Owen with the ‘Inhumanity of War’. This is literally the case in the
poems’ alienation of war (via the agency of the supernatural or inanimate). ‘Dulce et
Decorum Est’, by contrast, insists that the inhumanity of war is the want of humanity
on the part of those who represent it as a desirable and proper state of affairs.
Owen carefully recorded the ‘motives’ of the poems he was collecting, presumably
as an aid to their ordering and selection.^46 These bald, sometimes instrumental,
paraphrases emphasize the didactic thrust of the volume (as do the poems he labels
doubtful, such as ‘1914’, ‘Greater Love’, and ‘Identity Disc’): ‘willingness of the
old to sacrifice the young’ (his powerful recasting of Abraham and Isaac), ‘the
insupportability of war’ (‘S.I.W.’, a multifaceted narrative which gives the lie to
the self-inflicted wound), ‘vastness of losses’, ‘horrible beastliness of war’ (an oddly
apposite description for the allegorizing of ‘The Show’), ‘foolishness of war’ (there is
more to ‘Strange Meeting’ than that). Grief is represented by ‘Anthem for Doomed
Youth’, the Tennysonian Arthurianism of ‘Hospital Barge’ and ‘Futility’, which are
gathered after poems labelled ‘cheerfulness’. Alongside a group dealing with ‘the
soul of soldiers’, the latter are an aspect of Owen’s complication of his portrait of
the serviceman. The scheme in which he prepared his poems for the public brings
out the variousness of his perspectives on the war, but it also promoted the political
at the expense of the poetic. However, as Murry noted in 1920, in the new writing
he was doing in 1918, ‘there is no more rebellion, but only pity and regret, and
the peace of acquiescence’.^47 Like the famous draft preface, ‘Disabled and Other
Poems’ is an attempt to straighten out some of the contradictions in his evolving
poetry of war.
Owen and the Poetry of War
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••‘Apologia pro Poemate Meo’, Dominic Hibberd has suggested, represents a dis-
tancing from Sassoon (‘Poetry with him is become a mere vehicle of propaganda’)
at the behest of Robert Graves, who urged him that ‘a poet should have a spirit
above wars’.^48 It also transforms Owen’s didacticism into something else, with
which readers and critics have been less comfortable (even where they have been
(^44) Owen, ‘Inspection’, inComplete Poems and Fragments, 95.
(^45) Owen, ‘The Last Laugh, ibid. 168.
(^46) See Owen’s lists of contents, inComplete Poems and Fragments, ii. 539.
(^47) Murry, ‘Poet of the War’, 706.
(^48) Hibberd,Wilfred Owen,293–4; Owen to Leslie Gunston, 30 Dec. 1917, and Robert Graves to
Wilfred Owen,c.22 Dec. 1917, inCollected Letters, 520 and 596.