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THE FURY
AND THE MIRE
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••jon stallworthy
‘My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.’^1 That was
Wilfred Owen in 1918.Mysubject, many wars later, is ‘War and the fury of War.
The Poetry is in the fury.’
Poetry is notoriously difficult to define. ‘Of the many definitions’, said W. H.
Auden, ‘the simplest is still the best: ‘‘memorable speech’’.’^2 To be worth writing,
and reading, it must be memorable—as so much so-called poetry is not. And
what do we mean by ‘War Poetry’? Logically, this category—to my mind, this
unsatisfactory category—should embrace any poem about any aspect of war: it
should include Eliot’sThe Waste Landand ‘Little Gidding’; it should include Yeats’s
‘The Second Coming’. Each has a World War at its centre, and in the field—the
battlefield—of poetry it is hard to think of speech more memorable. But when we
speak of ‘war poetry’ we normally mean battlefield poems, and my subject in this
essay is the controlled fury of battlefield poems. These, too, can be difficult to define,
but we know them when we see—and hear—them: Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum
Est’, for example. What does that poem do? First of all, it persuades us that it is
true; secondly, that its truth is shocking; and thirdly, that we should do something
about it. Owen offers us what a medieval rhetorician would call anexemplum,an
(^1) Wilfred Owen, ‘Preface’, inTheCompletePoemsandFragments, ii:The Manuscripts and Fragments,
ed. Jon Stallworthy (London: Chatto & Windus, Hogarth Press, and Oxford University Press, 1983),
535.
(^2) W. H. Auden, ‘Introduction to‘‘The Poet’s Tongue’’ ’, inThe English Auden: Poems, Essays, and
Dramatic Writings 1927–1929, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1977), 327.