Pity, then, is the opposite of artistic impersonality; it is the personal
involvement of the artist in the work, and inDe Profundis, it becomes the
ideal mode of the artist. For pity is defined as imaginative sympathy for
sorrow, and sorrow as the form of true art, and hence the thing that makes
Christ the ‘ideal artist’:
Christ... took the entire world of the inarticulate, the voiceless world of pain, as
his kingdom, and made of himself its eternal mouthpiece... his desire was to be
to the myriads who had found no utterance a very trumpet through which they
might call to Heaven. And feeling, with the artistic nature of one to whom
Sorrow and Suffering were modes through which he could reach his conception
of the beautiful... he makes himself the image of the Man of Sorrows.^22
It is very possible Owen would have seen his own mission to speak for
his men here; certainly he quotes fromDe Profundison Christ in a letter
written to his mother two months before drafting his Preface.^23 The
difficulty of making a direct translation ofDe Profundisinto Owen’s
poetic, though, is that at the same time as he is asserting sympathy for
pain, Wilde is undercutting it by insisting that suffering is simply a mode
of reaching the beautiful (he has earlier insisted that pain is true art
because it has no object other than itself ). This would be to insist with
Kant that sympathy and aesthetics have no truck with one another, and
elsewhere Wilde and Owen would insist that they do. Where they differ is
that Owen’s poetry lets pain remain pain even when conjoined with the
aesthetic, where Wilde would simply turn pain into art, sentimentalising
his ‘pity’ into aesthetics again. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has argued from
Wilde’s late work that pity and the sentimental becomes part of the
‘epistemology of the closet’ in ‘the period from the 1880 s through the
First World War’, because it is a feminine discourse of emotion played by
men, centred around vicarious identification with images of the suffering
male body.^24 Pity’s oscillation between self-interest and sympathy thus
marks all its devotion to other people with a stagily self-admiring, self-
protecting consciousness essential to Wilde’s depthless brand of camp, but
perhaps homophilia in this period has more than one epistemology. For
Owen was indeed interested in tear-stained feelings centred on the male
body, but his situation was anything but vicarious: as with hisexcessof
form, the war would ultimately make any theatricality of the situation
testimony to its unbearableness.
This means that Owen’s pity is a good deal more complex than
straightforward ‘sympathy’, because it must therefore take place in the
context of pain which cannot be safely bounded by aestheticising or
The passions of Wilfred Owen 195