“Anthem for Doomed Youth” and Other Poems
“Anthem for Doomed Youth” and Other Poems
by Wilfred Owen
THE LITERARY WORK
War poetry written and set in France during World War 1, 1914-18; first published in 1920.
SYNOPSIS
Owen’s poetry portrays the grim horrors of trench warfare and the futile waste or youthful manhood.
Events in History at the Time of the Poetry
Wilfred Edward Salter, born on March 18, 1893, in the village of Oswestry in Shropshire, England, was the eldest son of a minor railway official. Educated at the Birkenhead Institute and at Shrewsbury Technical College, Owen matriculated in 1911 but without the honors necessary to enter a university. Like his mother, to whom he was quite close, Owen was religious and even considered pursuing a career in the church. In 1911-12, he worked as an unpaid lay assistant to a vicar in the poor country parish of Dunsden, where he taught Bible classes, led prayer meetings, and attended missionary gatherings. Owen meanwhile began to compose poetry. After suffering a serious illness in 1913, Owen left to teach English in Bordeaux, France, and was there when World War I broke out. Owen eventually enlisted in the army, which led to his fighting as an officer at the western front in 1917. Hospitalized for some months with “shell shock,” Owen met the war poet, Siegfried Sassoon, whose realistic verse deeply influenced Owen’s own work. Continuing to write poetry, Owen returned to the army in November 1917, serving with distinction—he received the Military Cross. He was killed in action a week before the war ended. Sassoon oversaw the posthumous first publication of Owen’s poems, which garnered critical praise for their mastery of rhyme and their unflinchingly realistic depiction of the horrors of modern war.
Events in History at the Time of the Poetry
Owen’s wartime experiences
Originally, Owen did not intend to enlist in the British army, but following a visit to a hospital for the wounded, he decided, in September 1915, to return to England and join up. After 14 months of training with the Artists’ Rifles in various parts of England, Owen was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment on June 4, 1916, and posted to the western front later that same year.
The winter of 1916-17 was a particularly difficult time in the war—the Battle of the Somme, an Allied offensive campaign launched the previous summer, was proving unsuccessful. By November 1916, torrential autumn rains had turned the battlefield into a sea of mud, preventing Allied armies from advancing more than five miles and helping the Germans retain their seemingly impregnable positions in the trenches. Owen’s first task once he was sent to the front lines was to hold positions in No Man’s Land—the unoccupied territory between the Allied and German armies—in the Beaumont Hamel region in France; later, he was sent behind the lines for a transport course. Owen had a number of close calls in that period, falling into a cellar and suffering a concussion in March 1917, then getting blown into the air by a shell while participating in a successful attack on the village of Fayet in April. This action lasted 12 days, and Owen was forced to spend several of those days sheltering in a hole near the dismembered remains of a fellow officer.
Although Owen escaped physical injury, soon after the action he was judged “unfit to command troops” and diagnosed as suffering from neurasthenia—“shell shock,” or what today is called posttraumatic stress disorder. Many soldiers, including Owen’s contemporary and fellow war poet Robert Graves, suffered from “shell shock,” which involved symptoms such as sporadic fits of uncontrollable weeping, twitching, voiding of the bowels, nightmares, and periodic depression. Owen was sent to Craiglock-hart Hospital in Edinburgh, Scotland, a facility famous for its treatment of shell shock victims. While at Craiglockhart, Owen met Siegfried Sas-soon, an older poet who not only helped Owen with poetry but also influenced him to adopt a more critical view of England’s role in the war. Both Owen and Sassoon contributed to the Hydra, a literary magazine produced by the patients at Craiglockhart. Owen even took over the editorship of the magazine for the issue of August 4, 1917.
Discharged from Craiglockhart in November 1917, Owen was posted to Scarborough to take charge of the domestic affairs of a large hotel that was being used as a barracks, then later to Ripon. Much of Owen’s war poetry was composed during that time. By August 1918, Owen was judged fit for active duty, and he returned to the front lines in France. Although he suspected he might not return alive from the war, he accepted his probable fate calmly and led his troops with an increased confidence and authority. In early October 1918, shortly before he was awarded the Military Cross, England’s equivalent of the Purple Heart, for capturing a German machine-gun emplacement and turning it upon the enemy, Owen wrote to his mother, “I came out in order to help these boys—directly by leading them as well as an officer can; indirectly, by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them as well as a pleader can. I have done the first” (Owen, War Poems and Others, p. 107). On November 4, 1918, just one week before the armistice, Owen was killed while leading his men across the Sambre Canal near Ors, France. He was 25 years old at the time. The bells in his home town in Shropshire were ringing on November 11, 1918, in celebration of the armistice when the doorbell buzzed at his parents’ home, bringing them the telegram with news of their son’s death.
Trench warfare
Among the innovations of war on the western front was the system of trench warfare. There were normally three lines of trenches. The front-line trench was anywhere from 50 yards or so to a mile from its enemy counterpart, the area between them being known as No Man’s Land. Several hundred yards behind the front-line trench was the support trench, and several hundred yards behind that was the reserve line.
There were actually three kinds of trenches: firing trenches (the front-line trenches); communication trenches, running roughly perpendicular to the lines and connecting the three lines; and “saps,” shallower ditches thrust out into No Man’s Land and used as observation posts, listening posts, grenade-throwing posts, and machine gun positions. Saps were usually manned at night.
British troops normally rotated trench duty. After a week of so-called “rest” behind the lines, a unit would move up—at night—to relieve a unit in the front-line trench. After three days to a week or more in that position, that unit moved back for a similar length of time to the support trench, and finally back to the reserve trench. Then it was time for another week of rest. In the three lines of trenches the main business of the soldier was to exercise self-control while being shelled. Casualties were heavy, as soldier’s diaries and letters attest. T. S. Eliot, in a letter he sent to The Nation magazine on July 23, 1917, quoted the following anonymous soldier’s account:
Perhaps you are tempted to give them a picture of a leprous earth scattered with the swollen and blackening corpses of hundreds of young men. The appalling stench of rotting carrion mingled with the sickening smell of exploded lyddite and ammonal. Mud like porridge, trenches like shallow and sloping cracks in the porridge— porridge that stinks in the sun. Swarms of flies and bluebottles clustering on pits of offal. Wounded men lying in the shell holes among the decaying corpses: helpless under the scorching sun and bitter nights, under repeated shelling. Men with bowels dropping out, lungs shot away, with blinded, smashed faces, or limbs blown into space. Men screaming and gibbering. Wounded men hanging in agony on the barbed wire, until a friendly spout of liquid fire shrivels them up like a fly in a candle. But these are only words, and probably convey only a fraction of their meaning to their hearers. They shudder, and it is forgotten.
(Eliot in Hibberd, p. 100-01)
Along with trench warfare came new weaponry during World War I. The war saw the introduction of tanks, planes, and submarines. Also new was poison gas—an element that figures in Owen’s poetry. Germany was the first nation to use tear gas, on October 27, 1914. In the battle of Ypres during April 1915, many of the 60,000 were killed by chlorine gas attacks, because England had not yet come up with the box respirator, forerunner of the modern gas mask.
Propaganda and the outbreak of war
Since the late nineteenth century, Britain had uneasily watched Germany’s rise as a military and industrial power. By the time World War I broke out in 1914, many had come to believe that conflict with Germany was inevitable, a belief encouraged by vast amounts of pro-war propaganda circulated by the government, the press, private patriotic organizations, and even popular British authors. Historian Gate Haste argues that the purpose of pro-war propaganda entails “building up the image of national and allied leaders as the embodiment of courage, heroism, and resolution, while the enemy leaders become the embodiment of evil and the scapegoats for the war”; also “propaganda builds an image of war itself as “glorious and heroic, and exciting enough to arouse the desire to take part,” leaving out grue-
WASTAGE IN WORLD WAR I
World War I had its share of famous battles, although as the scholar Paul Fussell has said, “To call these things battles is to imply an understandable continuity with earlier British history and to imply that the war makes sense in a traditional way,” when in fact such terms are used “in the interest o! neatness and the assumption of something like a rational causality (Fusseil, p 9), The German attempt to break through at Verdun in 1916 (February-july) involved 2 million men, and caused 1 million casualties. It failed. The British offensive on the Somme in June 1916 designed to force the Germans to end the Verdun offensive, cost Britain 420,000 dead— 60,000 on the first day of the attack, It is not surprising that in the memory of the British and French/who fought most of the war on the western front, World War I remained the “Great War, more terrible and traumatic than World War U. A list of some of the major actions follows;
- Ypres (Belgium) April 22, 1915: 60,000 killed.
- Leos (France) September 15-26, 1915; 60,000 killed,
- Somme (France) British attack, on July 1, 1916: 60,000 out of a total force of 110,000 killed or wounded on the first day of battle; 20,000 dead in No Marl’s land,
- Ypres (Belgium) Third battle of Ypres on April 9, 1917; 160,000 killed or wounded
- Passchendaele (Belgium) July 31-November 15, 1917: 370,000 dead or wounded; many men frozen to death or literally drowned in mud,
- Somme (France) Germans attack, on March 21-27, 1916: 300,000 British killed.
The British used the euphemistic term “wastage for casualties. Battlefield cemeteries in France and Belgium are famous for their vast expanses of orderly white crosses, and while these white crosses give visitors the illusion that each soldier has his own grave, in fact most of these fields constitute mass graves where men and parts of men were buried lit bulk and not in neat rows.
some or shocking details that would discourage support (Haste, p. 3).
In the early years of World War I, the British government did not need to establish a formal propaganda machine at the home front. After Germany invaded Belgium, which France and Britain were pledged to protect, most British firmly felt that their country would be fighting in a just cause and supported the ensuing war. On behalf of the British government, Henry Herbert Asquith, the prime minister, issued a statement defining the nature of the conflict: “We are fighting to vindicate the principle that small nationalities are not to be crushed in defiance of international good faith by the arbitrary will of a strong and overmastering power … not for the maintenance of its own selfish interests, but. for principles the maintenance of which is vital to the civilized world” (Asquith in Haste, pp. 22-24).
Asquith’s sentiments were reiterated and expanded upon in other media as well. Patriotic organizations, such as the Central Committee for National Patriotic Organizations, were quickly formed and circulated pro-war pamphlets. The popular press published inflammatory cartoons and sketches. One cartoon in Punch depicted Germany as a towering bully armed with a cudgel advancing upon a child (“Little Belgium”) carrying only a stick, and in September 1914, 53 of Britain’s authors signed a public statement in The Times supporting the war (Haste, p. 23). Signatories included the novelists H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, and Arthur Conan Doyle.
Other writers published stories, poems, and songs that further fueled nationalistic and patriotic impulses. In November 1914, Jessie Pope, a poetess and the author of several pre-war children’s books, exhorted the young men of England to take up arms in “The Call”:
Who’s for the trench—
Are you, my laddie?
Who’ll follow the French—
Will you, my laddie?
Who’s fretting to begin,
Who’s going to win?
And who wants to save his skin—
Do you, my laddie?
(Pope in Stallworthy, p. 227)
Such poems as Pope’s appealed blatantly to idealistic young men’s hunger for glory, as well as making veiled insinuations of cowardice towards those opposed to the war or reluctant to enlist. It was just this sort of saber-rattling verse that Owen and his fellow war poets found so appalling after they had actually experienced combat on the western front, especially in the later years of the war.
The British public, however, remained largely ignorant of the true conditions under which their troops were fighting: newspaper correspondents were not allowed to visit the front and, as a form of “negative propaganda,” military leaders and the government itself restricted access to all information, thus promoting a false image of the war and Britain’s success in it. As late as 1917, despite increased criticism of the war in some circles, the poet Sir Henry Newbolt published Book of the Happy Warrior, which told the story of chivalry in the medieval era and was intended to inspire boys in wartime England to noble deeds. E. B. Osborn edited a collection of war poems, The Muse in Arms, in which parallels between sport and the current war were continually established. In “Rugby Football—written on receiving the football-match list from Ilkley Grammar School,” the speaker asks, “Can you hear the call? Can you hear the call/That drowns the roar of Krupp/But hark, can you hear it? Over all—Now, School! Now, School! Play up’” (Osborn in Girouard, p. 286).
The Poetry in Focus
Contents summary
Owen’s war poems—23 of which were printed in the first edition of his poetry—depict the grim facts of trench warfare, stressing in particular the human cost of war: the ravages of gas attacks on their victims, the horrors of seeing the frail bodies of beautiful young men crushed and broken by industrially mass-produced armaments, and the desolation in witnessing an entire generation laid waste. The romanticized view of war, presented in the works of many of Owen’s contemporaries, continually gives way to an unsparingly realistic perspective of a soldier at the front, which at the same time manifests compassion. Owen himself wrote in a draft preface meant to precede his poems when they were published:
This book is not about heroes. English Poetry
is not yet fit to speak of them.
Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything
about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion,
or power, except War.
Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.
My subject is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity.
(War Poems and Others, p. 137)
“Anthem for Doomed Youth”
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
—Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning, save the choirs,
— The shrill demented choirs of wailing shells’
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
In the sonnet “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” the speaker asks what rites are most appropriate for the ill-fated soldiers of this modem war. The conventional symbols of mourning—the “passing bells,” the “hasty orisons,” the flowers, and candles—are revealed as hollow “mockeries” to those who perish before “the monstrous anger of the guns” to the sounds of “wailing shells.” Rather, the speaker calls for quieter, more thoughtful observances and memorials to dead soldiers: “the holy glimmers of goodbyes” in the eyes of young boys, the “pallor of girls’ brows,” the “tenderness of patient minds,/And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.” The empty ceremonies that usually attend the dead are replaced by something simpler yet more heartfelt, which the speaker feels is more appropriate to doomed youth “who die as cattle.”
Dulce et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge.
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-nines [5.9 caliber shells] that dropped behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! —An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime ...
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
A far angrier note is sounded in “Dulce Et Decorum Est,” which depicts, by turns, the unglamorous march of sick, weary soldiers, some bootless and “blood-shod,” towards their “distant rest,” the sudden horror of a gas attack, followed by the lingering nightmare—continually relived in dreams by the speaker—of seeing one comrade, who failed to don his mask in time, “guttering, choking, drowning” in the poison gas, then hearing “the blood/Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs” of the dying victim as he is borne off in a wagon. In the final lines, the speaker addresses a particular reader—identified by Owen scholars as Jessie Pope—and declares that, had she experienced “in some smothering dreams” the horror of what he himself had seen, “you would not tell with such high zest/To children ardent for some desperate glory,/The old line: Dulce et decorum est/Pro patria mori.” The Latin tag, from Horace, meant, as Owen explained to his mother, “It is sweet and meet to die for one’s country. Sweet! and decorous]” (Owen in Stallworthy, p. 228).
Futility
Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it awoke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds—
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?
“Futility” is written in a tone distinctive from the elegiac somberness of “Anthem for Doomed Youth” and the furious indignation of “Dulce et Decorum Est.” The first stanza reveals that a man—presumably a soldier—has died, though the cause of death is unclear. The speaker exhorts that the man’s body be moved “into the sun” whose touch has always awakened him before: “If anything might rouse him now/The kind old sun will know.” But as the man remains lifeless, the speaker is moved to contemplate nature’s power to awaken life in seeds and “the clays of a cold star,” contrasted with nature’s inability to revive mortal “clay,” as represented by the dead soldier: “Are limbs, so dear achieved, are sides/Full nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?/Was it for this the clay grew tall?” “Futility” concludes on a note both pensive and poignant as the speaker wonders, what made fatuous sunbeams toil/To break earth’s sleep at all?”
Poets at the front
Although Owen’s war poetry has attained fame for its brutal honesty about fighting in the trenches, it must be noted that initially he was as susceptible as any other idealistic young man of his generation to the lure of honor and glory that the Great War seemed to promise those who enlisted. In August 1914, shortly after war had been declared, young Englishmen were joining up by the thousands. At the time, Owen was working on a poem tentatively titled “The Ballad of Peace and War,” which contained the lines: meet it is and passing sweet/To live in peace with others,/But sweeter still and far more meet To die in war for brothers” (Owen in Stallworthy, p. 104). Upon deciding to enlist himself in 1915, Owen wrote to a friend, “I don’t imagine that the German War will be affected by my joining in, but I know my own future Peace will be… . Having now some increase of physical strength I feel proportionately useful and proportionately lacking in sense if I don’t use it in the best way—The Only Way” (War Poems and Others, p. 59).
Owen’s enthusiasm survived training and even his arrival in France. On first hearing the Drum & Fife Band after enlisting, he admitted that it roused the fighting spirit in him: “Th sound, together with the gallant bearing of the twenty fifers, has finally dazzled me with Military Glory” (War Poems and Others, p. 59). He even described his first hearing of the guns while in France as “a sound not without a certain sublimity” (Owen in Stallworthy, p. 153). And in the early months of 1917, as Britain struggled through the unsuccessful aftermath of the Somme offensive, Owen wrote to his mother, “There is a fine heroic feeling about being in France, and 1 am in perfect spirits. A tinge of excitement is about me, but excitement is always necessary to my happiness” (War Poems and Others, p. 60). As the war continued and Owen’s own combat experience increased, that “fine heroic feeling” was succeeded by dismay at the cold and filth soldiers were forced to endure in camps and trenches, pity for his dead and wounded comrades, and anger over the carnage caused by war. In February 1917, Owen wrote again to his mother:
I suppose I can endure cold, and fatigue, and the face-to-face death, as well as another; but extra for me there is the universal pervasion of Ugliness. Hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language and nothing but foul, even from one’s own mouth (for all are devil ridden), everything unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dug-outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth. In poetry we call them the most glorious. But to sit with them all day, all night … and a week later to come back and find them still sitting there, in motionless groups, THAT is what saps the “soldierly spirit.”
(War Poems and Others, p. 64)
Many of the “war poets”—including Edward Thomas (1878-1917), Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1917), Ivor Gurney (1890-1937), and Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)—had wartime experiences similar to Owen’s. However idealistically or romantically they had viewed or written about the war when they first enlisted, they soon awakened to its dangers, horrors, and squalor after they were sent to the front. While “Georgian” poets in Britain—so named because they were writing during the reign of King George V—continued to compose meditative, even nostalgic poems on such subjects as the English countryside or stirring patriotic verses praising the gallantry of young Englishmen fighting for king and country, the war poets integrated their visceral reactions to the war— shock, disgust, disillusionment, black humor— into their writing. Brutally honest subject matters and innovative poetic techniques were two of the hallmarks of the war poets’ works. In “Dead Man’s Dump,” for example, Rosenberg eschews rhymes and traditional verse forms in favor of stark, terse sentences:
The air is loud with death,
The dark air spurts with fire,
The explosions ceaseless are.
Timelessly, now, some minutes past,
These dead strode time with vigorous life,
Till the shrapnel called “An end!”
(Rosenberg in Abrams, p. 1841)
Sassoon, by contrast, often retained rhymes and traditional forms, letting his scathingly critical tone and startling images communicate his increasingly anti-war sentiments, as in his sonnet “Glory of Women”:
You can’t believe that British troops “retire”
When hell’s last horror breaks them, and they run,
Trampling the terrible corpses—blind with blood.
O German mother dreaming by the fire,
While you are knitting socks to send your son
His face is trodden deeper in the mud.
(Sassoon in Abrams, p. 1843)
While the need to express and perhaps exorcise their traumatic experiences at the front was arguably the war poets’ primary motive for writing, in the case of Sassoon and Owen, the need to educate the largely ignorant British public about the horrors of modern warfare was equally compelling. As Owen somberly wrote in the draft preface to the book of poems he was never to see printed in his lifetime: “[T]hese elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful” (War Poems and Others, p. 137).
Sources and literary context
Owen’s war poetry was primarily drawn from his experiences and observations as an officer serving in World War I. In some poems, Owen also reacted to the writing of his contemporaries and their expressed views on the war. John Stallworthy, Owen’s biographer, contends that “Anthem for Doomed Youth” may have been Owen’s response to an anonymous prefatory note in Poems of Today (1916), a collection of verse that Owen possessed, which announced,
Most of the writers [in this book] are living and the rest are still vivid among us, while one of the youngest, almost as these words are written, has gone singing to lay down his life for his country’s cause . there is no arbitrary isolation of one theme from another; they mingle and interpenetrate throughout, to the music of Pan’s flute, and of Love’s viol, and the bugle-call of Endeavour, and the passing-bell of Death.
(Anonymous in Stallworthy, p. 216)
OTHER VOICES; OWEN’S CONTEMPORARIES
Two contrasting view points on war can be found in the poems of Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) and Stegfrted Sassdon (1886-1967), “Went 10 war with Rupert Brooke,” went a popular saying of the time, and came home with Siegfried Sassoon” (Abrarm, p. 1849) Brooke, who composed a series of war sonnets In 1914, died of dysentery and blood poisoning before ever seeing combat—on a troop ship bound for Gallipot His farnoys sonnet “The Soldier” expresses the romanticism and Idealism shared by many of W$ coiitem poraries early in the war. By contrast, Siegfried Sassoon experlemred the horrors of trench warfare firsthand and his biting pungent verses reflect that reality,
Siegfried Sassoon’s “They”
The Bishop tells us: “When the boys come back
They will not be the same? for they’ll have fought
in a just cause: they lead the last attack
On Anti-Christ; their comrades blood has bought
New right to breed an honourable race
They have challenged Death and dared Mm face to face”
We’re none of us the samel the toys reply,
For George fost both his legs; and Bills stone Blind
Poor Jim’s shot through the lungs and like to die;
And Bert’s gone syphilitic: you’ll not find
A chap who’s served that hasn’t (found some change,
And the Bishop said: ‘The ways of Cod are strange!”
(Sassooft in Abrams, p, 1842)
As a second lieutenant in the army, “Mad Jack” Sassoon fought courageously at Mametz Wood and In the Somme Offensive of July 1916, receiving the Military Cross After being wounded In the chest by a sniper’s bullet, Sassoon was invalided back to England In April 1917, While recovering, he sent this declaration to his commanding officer* 1 am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and 1 can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust (Sassoon in Stallworthy, p. 206), The military authorities responded to Sassoon’s manifesto by announcing that he was suffering shelf shock and sending him to Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh for treatment.
The trenchant opening line of Owen’s sonnet— “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?”—certainly lends some credence to Stall-worthy’s argument. Similarly, the poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” was directed at a contemporary’s pro-war writings, in this case, Jessie Pope’s patriotic children’s books and poems. Early drafts of “Dulce et Decorum Est” carried bracketed dedications “To Jessie Pope etc” and “To a certain Poetess.”
As a child, Owen began experimenting with verse, and his war poems are distinguished particularly by the use of pararhymes, rhymes in which two words are identical in consonant sounds not only after but also before different stressed vowel sounds. In “Futility,” for example, Owen uses pararhymes like “star/stir,” “seeds/sides,” and “tall/toil.” Pararhymes had been used to some small effect by modem French poets but were also a feature of some ancient Welsh poems, a fact of which Owen, himself partly Welsh, was likely aware.
Owen’s most obvious poetical influences seem to have been John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley (see Eve of St. Agnes, and England in 1819 and Other Poems , in WLAIT 3: British and Irish Literature and Its Times). There is evidence that in his late teens, Owen read widely in the work of the loose grouping of contemporary poets who came to be called Georgians, named for King George V, who ascended the British throne in 1910. By the end of 1917 he had read recent books by such contributors to the well-known anthology Georgian Poetry as Harold Munro, John Masefield, Robert Nichols, John Drinkwater, Rupert Brooke, Walter de la Mare, and Sassoon.
Of those named, Sassoon was to have the most profound effect upon Owen’s poetry, encouraging the younger man to adopt a leaner, more colloquial style and censuring “the over-luscious writing of [Owen’s] immature pieces” (Sassoon in Poupard, p. 199). Sassoon noted and rejoiced in his friend’s rapid poetic development and the growing confidence that soon helped Owen find his own voice. In later years, he insisted,
The truth of the matter was that 1 arrived just when he needed my stimulation and advice. It was my privilege to be in close contact with him while he was attaining a clear view of what he wanted to say and deploying his technical resources to a matured utterance. . I count it among my most satisfactory performances that I was able to be of service to his genius.
(Sassoon in Poupard, p. 199)
Reception
Only five of Owen’s poems were published in his lifetime. Sassoon edited the first collection, which appeared in 1920. The reaction to the first collection was, for the most part, favorable, although some readers took issue with Owen’s stance on the war and his attacks on those who had supported it. Sir Henry New bolt, who had written numerous patriotic poems in the late nineteenth century, admitted in a letter that Owen’s poems were “terribly good, but of course limited, almost all on one note,” complaining, “Owen and the rest of the broken men rail at the Old Men who sent the young to die … what Englishman of fifty wouldn’t far rather stop the shot himself than see the boys do it for him?” (New bolt in Poupard, p. 199). Several years later, W. B. Yeats would exclude Owen’s work from his 1936 edition of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse, dismissing it in a letter as “all blood and dirt and sucked sugar-stick” (Yeats in Hall, p. 262).
Overall, however, most commentators admired Owen’s poems. The reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement wrote, “[Owen] is pitiless with his readers, but for the sake of utter truth and faithfulness where pity belongs. And the tenderness behind his relentlessness gives the hard brutal words a strange, improbable beauty” (Anonymous in Poupard, p. 198). The critic John Middleton Murry declared,
Here in thirty-three brief pages is the evidence that Wilfred Owen was the greatest poet of the war. . In these poems there is no more rebellion, but only pity and regret, and the peace of acquiescence. It is not a comfortable peace, this joyless yet serene resignation; but it is a victory of the human spirit. We receive from it that exalted pleasure, that sense of being lifted above the sphere of anger and despair which the poetic imagination alone can give.
(Murry in Hall, p. 359)
—James Caufield and Pamela S. Loy
For More Information
Abrams, M. H. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2. 6th ed. New York: Norton, 1993.
Bell, John, ed. Wilfred Owen: Selected Letters. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Buitenhuis, Peter. The Great War of Words: British, American, and Canadian Propaganda and Fiction, 1914-1933. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987.
Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. London: Oxford University Press, 1975.
Girouard, Mark. The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981.
Hall, Sharon K., ed. Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Vol. 5. Detroit: Gale Group, 1981.
Haste, Gate. Keep the Home Fires Burning: Propaganda in the First World War. London: Penguin, 1977.
Hibberd, Dominic. The First World War. London: Macmillan, 1990.
Owen, Wilfred. War Poems and Others. London: Chatto & Windus, 1973.
Poupard, Dennis, ed. Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Vol. 27. Detroit: Gale Group, 1988.
Stallworthy, Jon. Wilfred Owen. London: Oxford University Press, 1970.