war poetry and the realm of the senses celebrated cult of ‘pity’ and touches us on that fragile spot where distinctions blur.
Throughthe most caressive of lyric voices, he draws us into moments of extreme
sense experience, weaving linguistic-tactile fantasies around them: moments when
the body is violated (‘slashed bones bare’, ‘shaved us with his scythe’), the flesh gets
exposed (‘shatter of flying muscles’, ‘Ripped from my own back|In scarlet shreds’,
‘limped on, blood-shod’) or the mouth starts bleeding (‘I saw his round mouth’s
crimson deepen as it fell’).^26 A Georgian aesthete in the pre-war years, especially in
France, where he came under the influence of the Decadent pacifist poet Laurent
Tailhade—he thought of writing a book of sonnets entitled ‘Sonatas in Silence’
and to have it bound in purple and gold^27 —Owen brings with him not only the
vocabulary but the sensibility of the Decadents, at once charred and sharpened by
the war. The power and the peril of his verse lie in the precise fact that it is never
wholly ‘modernist’ while registering the ravages of modernity, that the decadent
investment in sound and the senses continues into his descriptions of historical
violence, and the pleasure principle is forever threatening to get out of hand.
Consider the following extract from his early poem, ‘Greater Love’:
Your slender attitude
Trembles not exquisite like limbs knife-skewed,
Rolling and rolling there
Where God seems not to care;
Till the fierce love they bear
Cramps them in death’s extreme decrepitude.
·········
Heart, you were never hot
Nor large, nor full like hearts made great with shot;
And though your hand be pale,
Paler are all which trail
Your cross through flame and hail:
Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not.^28
Instead of the implied ironic contrast with Swinburne’s ‘Before the Mirror’, there
seems to be almost an intertextual aural contagion: the point of the juxtaposition
(^26) Owen, ‘Apologia pro Poemate Meo’, 124; ‘The Next War’, 165; ‘A Terre’, 178; ‘Dulce et Decorum
Est’, 140; ‘[I saw his round mouth’s crimson deepen]’, 123; all inTheCompletePoemsandFragments,
i:The Poems, ed. Jon Stallworthy (London: Chatto & Windus, Hogarth Press, and Oxford University
Press, 1983).
(^27) See Dominic Hibberd,Owen the Poet(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986), 33.
(^28) Owen, ‘Greater Love’, inComplete Poems and Fragments, i. 166. Also see Jon Stallworthy,Wilfred
Owen(London: Oxford University Press, 1973); and Hibberd,Owen the Poet,andidem,Wilfred Owen:
A New Biography(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002). Recent critical works include Desmond
Graham,The Truth of War(Manchester: Carcanet, 1984); Douglas Kerr,Wilfred Owen’s Voices:
Language and Community(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Adrian Caesar,Taking It
Like a Man: Suffering, Sexuality and the War Poets: Brooke, Sassoon, Owen and Graves(Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1993). For a good overview, see Simon Featherstone (ed.),War Poetry:
An Introductory Reader(London: Routledge, 1995), 7–115.