wilfred owen must be truthful. The book will be ephemeral, so the poet does not specify names
andplaces. But if the spirit of the book survives Prussia (militarism in general, or
German militarism?), the poet’s ambition and the names of the heroes of whom
he cannot speak—another secret—will be transported from the fields of Flanders
(Elysium). (Those names would in fact be inscribed on the monumental masonry of
Flanders war cemeteries, because the authorities did not want to repatriate English
corpses.^72 )
‘The Poetry is in the pity’ further underwrites the legend of the poet made by
war. Larkin, though wary of Yeats’s ‘fatuous’ dismissal of a poetry of ‘reaction’,
thought it fair, in response to Day Lewis’s edition of Owen in 1963, to describe
‘not only what [Owen] wrote but how he wrote it’ as ‘historically predictable’.^73 It
is not weakened by ‘historical limitations’, because it was not a poetry of pacifist
protest (made obsolete or unpalatable by a second, ‘necessary’ world war) but a
poetry of compassion (Larkin’s synonym for Owen’s ‘pity’). The continuation of
war and suffering, and hence of the necessity for compassion, ‘makes him the only
twentieth-century poet who can be read after Hardy without a sense of bathos’.^74
Compassion is a late sense of pity, from the Latinpietas—piety—and is now
normally distinguished from the latter’s meaning of piousness, devotion, mind-
fulness of duty. Owen’s work is certainly deeply antithetical topietas, ‘the dutiful
respect owed...to parents and fatherland and gods’.^75 TheOEDdistinguishes two
chief modern senses of pity. One is an attribute of a person regarding others, ‘a
feeling or emotion of tenderness aroused by the suffering, distress or misfortune of
another, and prompting a desire for its relief; compassion, sympathy’. The second is
a transferred sense, an attribution to anoccurrence or situation: ‘A ground or cause
for pity; a subject of condolence, or (moreusually) simply of regret; a regrettable
fact or circumstance; a thing to be sorry for.’
‘The Poetry is in the pity.’ But is it in the feeling elicited by misfortune or in the
‘thing to be sorry for’, the occasion of that misfortune? Some have been happier
to fudge Owen’s elision of the aesthetic, as Dennis Welland, in the first substantial
study of the poet, does when he substitutes a more tractable formulation: ‘The pity
which is in the poetry’.^76 The proper reaction to suffering is compassion, which
carries the implication of remedy, if not in practice, then in fantasy. This is a relation
in which literature implicates its readers in vicarious empathy.^77 But ‘the thing
to be sorry for’ carries with it no such compulsion, and regret may be a reflex at
best: ‘after we have paid our tribute of regret to the affair considered as a calamity,
(^72) SeeJ.M.Winter,Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning(Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995).
(^73) Larkin, ‘The War Poet’, inRequired Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955–1982(London: Faber,
1983), 159.
(^74) Ibid. 163. (^75) Michael Grant,History of Rome(London: Faber, 1978), 60.
(^76) D. S. R. Welland,Wilfred Owen: A Critical Study(London: Chatto & Windus, 1960), 119.
(^77) For a discussion of literature and compassionate empathy, see e.g. Martha Nussbaum,Cultivating
Humanity: The Literary Imagination and Public Life(Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).