wilfred owen now brings stillness—‘beauty’, ‘music’, and ‘peace’—to the ‘shell-storms’.^58 His
menare transfigured into seraphs, curses and scowls at resented authority replaced
by a passion for sacrifice.
The reversals of ‘Apologia pro Poemate Meo’ appear excessive. Here, surely, is
a send-up of Pope’s inflated rhetoric of soldier-tourists, boys eager to be matched
with death in the ultimate test (that Owen recognized the psychological force of
these concepts and feelings is witnessed by his narrative of delusion in ‘Disabled’).^59
But this reaction—and how often is Great War poetry read ironically when it goes
against the grain of latter-day received opinion—is a mark of the disconcerting
qualities of Owen’s fascination with insensibility’s Romantic antithesis, afflatus.
War can be represented in terms of the civilian’s ignorance (a mode employed
by critics, notably Paul Fussell, as much as by poets) but also in terms of the
soldier’s inspiration. As Hibberd has come to stress in his painstaking reassessment
of Owen’s life and work, what singles Owen out is his mastery both of the kinship of
pleasure and abomination (in rhythm, rhyme, and image) and of the convergence
between his conception of the poet’s relations to the oracular (out of Keats’sThe
Fall of Hyperion) and the secrets into which soldiers are initiated.^60
‘Smile, Smile, Smile’, a late poem written in France, attempts to bring these
perspectives into alignment, and it does so with a novel representation of the
reader, this time a figure for the soldier, not the civilian. A group of wounded men,
‘head to limp head’, are hectored by yesterday’sMail, which preaches unending
war (also a war of generations, in the manner of ‘The Parable of the Old Man and
the Young’): ‘Peace would do wrong to our undying dead.’^61 Afighttothefinishis
represented as the only monument to those who ‘kept this nation in integrity’, but
in the poem the readers of this blague have no need to challenge it:
The half-limbed readers did not chafe
Butsmiledatoneanothercuriously
Like secret men who know their secret safe.In Remarque, and in Benjamin, war brings on muteness. Owen, who had kept
nothing about the Front secret from his mother Susan, his chief correspondent,
imagines instead a conspiracy of silence, a brotherhood of privileged knowledge
(issuesofknowingandnotknowing—bothsidesofthemilitary’s‘intheknow’—are
moreconsistentandcomplexreferencepointsinOwen’spoetrythanispity).Owen’s
figures for the unsayable are a link between the Romantic sublime and the Holocaust
of Lanzmann and Lyotard. It is significant that Owen specifies what this knowledge
is here (‘Apologia pro Poemate Meo’ begs to withhold what it has revealed):
(^58) Owen, ‘Apologia pro Poemate Meo’, inComplete Poems and Fragments, i. 124.
(^59) Amongst Owen’s legatees, the Oxbridge writers of the 1930s, notably the autobiographical
Isherwood, but also Auden and Spender, would labour under the moral burden of a missed test. 60
61 See Hibberd,Wilfred Owen, 294.
Owen, ‘Smile, Smile, Smile’, inComplete Poems and Fragments, i. 190.