Today in history: March 18, 1893

“My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.”

Wilfred Owen (now known as one of the best “war poets” of World War I) was born on this day in 1893. He was killed in battle in 1918 just seven days before the Armistice. He was 25 years old.

Owen was unpublished during his lifetime. He is now recognized, along with Rupert Brooke, and Siegfried Sassoon, as one of those rare poets who can put the horror of warfare into verse. Trench warfare, in particular. (Yeats disagreed. He disliked Owens’ poems, and did not include him – or any of the “war poets” in his The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935. Yeats wrote that Owen’s poems were “unworthy of the poet’s corner of a country newspaper”.) Owen was, of course, aware of Yeats, and used a quote from one of Yeats’s poems as an epigraph to one of his poems. He had an inner argument with Yeats, I suppose, and Yeats’s view of soldiers, war and death.

One of the most amazing things about these poems is the dates on them – September-October, 1917 / January 1918, etc. He is writing these poems in the thick of war. He is crouching in his tent scribbling these out. There is an immediacy to the verses, yes, and he is one of those sensitive souls who seems to have a larger-picture in his head, even in the midst of the day-to-day reality he is in. He sees the slaughter. He feels the tragedy of it. His main burst of creativity was from August 1917 to September 1918.

He was not patriotic, or at least, his poems are not. One of his poems was addressed to Jessie Pope, a poet who wrote motivational patriotic poems urging young men to enlist. Owen criticized that attitude. His poems are Romantic, certainly, full of loss and grief at the waste. He references Shakespeare, Shelley, the Bible, Keats – maybe not explicitly but in the sounds and rhythms he chooses. He self-consciously writes in these older forms, which is one of the reasons why his poems are so startling. World War I was, in a way, even more shattering, psychologically, than World War II, due to the newness of that kind of technologically advanced warfare. How would mankind go on, knowing what we can do? How on earth will anything ever be rebuilt? This was one of the driving forces of Modernism, as we know it, with poets like Ezra Pound and TS Eliot and Wallace Stevens and Yeats struggling to find language that would be able to HANDLE this new universe. It was a deeply destabilizing time. But Owen is not a modernist, although his poems are always included in those anthologies. His forms are even archaic, which gives them almost a feeling of elegy, all in all. By that I mean: by choosing to write about World War I using OLD forms, rather than trying to “make it new” (a la Ezra Pound’s advice to poets) – Owen is mourning a world that is passing away forever, right before his eyes. It’s one of the reasons why the poems are so strong.

Owen was probably gay, some of his earlier poems deal with having sensual urges towards other men, and it’s hard to say what would have happened to him should he have survived World War I. His journey towards poetry is really interesting. Here is my impression of it (and I say that, knowing only the bare bones of the story):

He grew up in a small town in England (near the border with Wales). He kind of drifted a bit, in terms of his schooling, due to financial constraints. He considered becoming a priest. But he had disturbing feelings about God’s inability to deal with human problems. He was a tutor for a while. When World War I broke out, he enlisted. In January, 1917, he was sent to the front. He found war glorious and exciting, similar to George Washington’s famous remark to his brother after his first experience with a battle in the French and Indian War: “I heard the bullets whistle, and, believe me, there is something charming in the sound.”

Wilfred Owen wrote home to his parents early on:

This morning I was hit! We were bombing and a fragment from somewhere hit my thumb knuckle. I coaxed out 1 drop of blood. Alas! No more!

The bloom soon was off the rose, and that following June, he was moved to a hospital because he suffered from shell-shock. (His heartwrenching poem “Mental Cases” is about what shell-shock is like). He was transported back to England and then Edinburgh. He was a mess. It was in the hospital in Edinburgh that he met Siegfried Sassoon – and this would be the event that would change his short life. Sassoon was a captain in the army and a poet, well-known. They aren’t really similar in style, but Sassoon obviously encouraged Owen – I so wonder about their conversations.

Owen wrote to Sassoon in November 1917:

I was always a mad comet; but you have fixed me.

Thus began his crazy output of poetry. Owen returned to the war in France in August 1918. He would be dead by November.

Sassoon published all of Owen’s poems posthumously, in 1920.

Wilfred Owen wrote to his mother on December 31, 1917:

I go out of this year a poet, my dear mother, as which I did not enter it. I am held peer by the Georgians; I am a poet’s poet. I am started. The tugs have left me; I feel the great swelling of the open sea taking my galleon.

Owen said, in regards to his war poems:

“These 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.”

It seems to me that his lack of interest in consoling his own generation is one of the reasons why his poems have lasted, and are anthologized – because they do rise up out of their own time. They cease to be local.

Here are some of Wilfred Owen’s poems.

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 good-byes.
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.

The End

After the blast of lightning from the east,
The flourish of loud clouds, the Chariot Throne;
After the drums of time have rolled and ceased,
And by the bronze west long retreat is blown,

Shall Life renew these bodies? Of a truth
All death will he annul, all tears assuage?-
Or fill these void veins full again with youth,
And wash, with an immortal water, Age?

When I do ask white Age he saith not so:
‘My head hangs weighed with snow.’
And when I hearken to the Earth, she saith:
‘My fiery heart shrinks, aching. It is death.
Mine ancient scars shall not be glorified,
Nor my titanic tears, the seas, be dried.’

On Seeing a Piece of Our Artillery Brought into Action

Be slowly lifted up, thou long black arm,
Great gun towering towards Heaven, about to curse;
Sway steep against them, and for years rehearse
Huge imprecations like a blasting charm!
Reach at that Arrogance which needs thy harm,
And beat it down before its sins grow worse;
Spend our resentment, cannon,–yea, disburse
Our gold in shapes of flame, our breaths in storm.

Yet, for men’s sakes whom thy vast malison
Must wither innocent of enmity,
Be not withdrawn, dark arm, thy spoilure done,
Safe to the bosom of our prosperity.
But when thy spell be cast complete and whole,
May God curse thee, and cut thee from our soul!

Futility

Move him into the sun–
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke 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?

Mental Cases

Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?
Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,
Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish,
Baring teeth that leer like skulls’ tongues wicked?
Stroke on stroke of pain, — but what slow panic,
Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets?
Ever from their hair and through their hand palms
Misery swelters. Surely we have perished
Sleeping, and walk hell; but who these hellish?

- These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.
Memory fingers in their hair of murders,
Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.
Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander,
Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.
Always they must see these things and hear them,
Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles,
Carnage incomparable and human squander
Rucked too thick for these men’s extrication.
Therefore still their eyeballs shrink tormented
Back into their brains, because on their sense
Sunlight seems a bloodsmear; night comes blood-black;
Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh
- Thus their heads wear this hilarious, hideous,
Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses.
- Thus their hands are plucking at each other;
Picking at the rope-knouts of their scourging;
Snatching after us who smote them, brother,
Pawing us who dealt them war and madness.