sarah cole
or truth that is not otherwise available’.^2 Thespeaking wound, an image Caruth
borrows from Freud (who in turn is reaching back to Tasso, in a literary-historical
chain whose structure may be symptomatic of the way in which pain has often been
articulated), resonates in part because it returns a fundamental productivity to the
sufferer, in the form of his/her urgent storytelling. In the case of Owen, the idea
that trauma can be productive in a literary sense, that the possibility of narrative
might even be endemic to the violent experience, is both resonant and problematic.
Himself shell-shocked, his texts often read like articulations of a deep and shared
wounding, and many of his poems were either composed or revised while he was
in psychological treatment at the mental facility Craiglockhart; at the same time,
Owen acknowledges, in a work like ‘The Poet in Pain’, that his personal pain must
be deliberately revived and re-created, that his work as spokesperson in a sense
requires that he be constantly, if imaginatively, re-wounded. The conscious poetic
processes may mime the speaking wound, but from a position of some considered
distance.^3
Owen played an important role in setting the tone for British war poetry in the
later twentieth century, and the sentiments expressed in ‘The Poet in Pain’ about
the intertwined relationship between language and suffering run very deep in his
work—and also, I will suggest, in a broader twentieth-century project of writing
about war. During the First World War, it was the soldier’s person that most directly
endured the bludgeon of history, and for Owen, the language to emerge from that
configuration, if it was to express war’s visceral power and elemental facts, must
hew very closely to the soldier’s torturous, embodied life in the specific landscape
of combat.^4 Though he notably disclaimed any interest in poetics (‘Above all I am
not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is
in the pity’),^5 Owen’s poems do, in fact, point towards an aesthetics of suffering,
(^2) Cathy Caruth,Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1996), 4. I borrow loosely from Caruth, whose notion of the ‘speaking wound’ is
resonant for my purposes, but I donot, in this essay, attempt to think seriously about trauma as a
central structure for mediating the relation between poetry and war.
(^3) This structure in a certain senserecalls Wordsworth’s ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’,
a connection which is not as disjunctive as itseems, given the powerful influence of English
Romanticism on many First World War poets, including Owen. For discussion of Romanticism and
Owen, see Jennifer Breen, ‘Wilfred Owen: ‘‘Greater Love’’ and Late Romanticism’,English Literature
in Transition (1880–1914), 17 (1974), 173–83; and Alan Tomlinson, ‘Strange Meeting in a Strange
Land: Wilfred Owen and Shelley’,Studies in Romanticism, 32/1 (Spring 1993), 75–95.
(^4) This essay takes its cues and examples, in large part, from combatant poetry, though I hope, in
my analysis, to suggest broader poetic tendencies that need not be defined by military service. Indeed,
it is problematic to restrict one’s focus to combatant poetry, a practice that has tended to marginalize
other voices (civilians and women, most obviously), and to grant an extreme sense of authenticity and
truth-value to the soldier-poet. For a helpful critique of this tendency, see James Campbell, ‘Combat
Gnosticism: The Ideology of First World War Poetry Criticism’,New Literary History: A Journal of
Theory and Interpretation, 30/1 (Winter 1999), 203–15.
(^5) Owen, ‘Preface’, inThe Complete Poems and Fragments, ii:The Manuscripts and Fragments,ed.
Jon Stallworthy (London: Chatto & Windus, Hogarth Press, and Oxford University Press, 1983), 535.