“My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.” — WWI poet Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen, 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. His poetry was not published during his lifetime. His main burst of creativity was from August 1917 to September 1918.

Similar to Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon, other young WWI soldier-poets, Owen expressed the horror of war not from an abstract point of view but from first-hand participation. (His work spoke to the moment in time, the horror of trench warfare, etc. Yeats disagreed that the poems had value, and did not include Owen, or any of the WWI “war poets”, in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935.

Owen’s poem drafts have dates jotted on them: September-October, 1917 / January 1918, etc. Those dates alone tell you everything. Horror. Those dates mean that Owen was crouching in a trench as he wrote. Owen wrote about that horror. Owen wrote a poem criticizing Jessie Pope, a widely read poet during the war. She wrote patriotic poems, urging young men to enlist. Owen’s poems, on the other hand, scream with grief at the waste. His influences were Shakespeare, Shelley, the Bible, Keats. World War I was shattering, psychologically: the newness of technologically advanced warfare, the newness of horror coming from the skies, the intractability of those trenches. The human mind and body is not built to withstand 24/7 combat, 24/7 stress and terror. Soldiers returned home in ruins, psychologically. An entire generation practically wiped out … the blank horror of that was one of the driving forces of Modernism, with poets like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens and Yeats struggling to find language to HANDLE the new universe. On the flip side: Owen was involved in the first “modern” war, but he used archaic old forms, and those forms give his poems the sound of an elegy to a lost world.

He grew up in a small town in England near the Welsh border. His schooling was intermittent due to his family’s financial constraints. He drifted a bit. Some of Owen’s earlier poems deal with having sexual urges towards other men. He considered becoming a priest, but had disturbing feelings about God’s inability to deal with human problems. He was a tutor. When World War I broke out, he enlisted. In January, 1917, he was sent to the front. He found war glorious and exciting at first, similar to George Washington’s famous remark (“I heard the bullets whistle, and, believe me, there is something charming in the sound.”) after his first experience with battle in the French and Indian War. But the glory wore off quick. He went through unimaginable horrors, as all soldiers did in that terrible war of the trenches.

The following June, he was moved to a hospital to recover from shell-shock. (His heartwrenching poem “Mental Cases” – below – details this experience). It was in the hospital in Edinburgh that he met Siegfried Sassoon. This was the event that would change his short life. Sassoon was an army captain as well as a well-known poet. Sassoon encouraged Owen in his work.

Thus began Owen’s poetic output. He returned to the war in France in August 1918. He would be dead by November.

In 1920, Sassoon brought out a volume of Owen’s poems.

Owen’s lack of interest in consoling his generation (see quote below) is one of the reasons why his poems have withstood the test of time. They rise up out of their own era. They continue to echo as warnings.

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.

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.

Strange Meeting

It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,—
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.

With a thousand fears that vision’s face was grained;
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
“Strange friend,” I said, “here is no cause to mourn.”
“None,” said that other, “save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something had been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled.
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
Courage was mine, and I had mystery;
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.

“I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now. . . .”

QUOTES:

Introduction to the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

At about the same time, in Sitwell’s anthologies called Wheels, she was vigorously attacking poetry less experimental than her own, and she also brought to light the war poems of Wilfred Owen.

Wilfred Owen, letter home to his parents from the front:

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!

W.B. Yeats on Owen’s poems:

Unworthy of the poet’s corner of a country newspaper…all blood, dirt and sucked sugar stick, clumsy, discordant.

Harold Bloom, Best Poems in the English Language:

It is immensely sad to contemplate what Owen would have written had he not died on the battlefield. The three poems I give here far transcend the pathos of their occasion, and touch the sublime through original vision, perfection of form and of diction, and Owen’s innovation in slant rhyme or pararhyme, which conveys an effect of baffled expectation, beautifully suited to the burden of his work.

Wilfred Owen, letter to Siegfried Sassoon in November 1917:

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

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Owens’s sharp rejection of Yeats’s at times heroic representation of death can be inferred from poems such as “S.I.W.”, which uses ironically a quotation from Yeats as its epigraph and presents a soldier’s death as a banal, even meaningless event.

Dylan Thomas:

“A poet of all times, all places, and all wars. There is only one war, that of men against men.

Wilfred Owen, letter, February 4, 1917:

Hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language … 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.

Siegfried Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey, 1916-1920:

[My] only claimable influence was that I stimulated him towards writing with compassionate and challenging realism…My encouragement was opportune, and can claim to have given him a lively incentive during his rapid advance to self-revelation.

C. Day Lewis, introduction to The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen (1963):

The originality and force of their language, the passionate nature of the indignation and pity they express, their blending of harsh realism with a sensuousness unatrophied by the horrors from which they flowered.

Wilfred Owen, letter 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.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Owens’s poems echo, or “rhyme slant” with the Bible and the works of earlier writers such as Dante, Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and especially John Keats. Owens’s poems convey the harrowing reality of war not by abandoning literary and religious language, but by putting it in dissonant new relationships with the absurdities of war experience.

T.S. Eliot on “Strange Meeting”:

“One of the most moving pieces of verse inspired by the war.”

Wilfred Owen, letter to his mother about Sassoon:

I am not worthy to light his pipe. I simply sit tight and tell him where I think he goes wrong.

Siegfried Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey, 1916-1920:

[My technique] was almost elementary compared with his [Owen’s] innovating experiments.

Wilfred Owen, letter to his mother, on freezing outside in the snow with his battalion, April 1917:

I kept alive on brandy, the fear of death, and the glorious prospect of the cathedral town just below us, glittering with the morning.

Lieutenant J. Foulkes on Owens in battle:

“This is where I admired his work—in leading his remnant, in the middle of the night, back to safety…I was content to follow him with the utmost confidence.

Editor Edmund Blunden to Siegfried Sassoon, expressing irritation with Owens’s mother’s lionizing her son after his death, even down to the cover design of Owens’s volume of poetry:

Mrs. Owen has had her way, with a purple binding and a photograph which makes W look like a 6 foot Major who had been in East Africa or so for several years.

Wilfred Owen, letter to his mother, May 1918:

I am old already for a poet, and so little is yet achieved. celebrity is the last infirmity I desire.

John Middleton Murry, 1920, on Owens’s slant-rhyme scheme:

“Subterranean … forged unity, a welded, inexorable massiveness.”

Wilfred Owen:

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.

Wilfred Owen to Siegfried Sassoon, two weeks before Owens’s death:

I cannot say I suffered anything, having let my brain grow dull…I shall feel anger again as soon as I dare, but now I must not. I don’t take the cigarette out of my mouth when I write Deceased over their letters. But one day I will write Deceased over many books.

C. Day Lewis:

[They are] probably the greatest poems about the war in our literature.

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33 Responses to “My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.” — WWI poet Wilfred Owen

  1. Kate says:

    Sheila. I’m so grateful to you for doing all the legwork. I had read about this young man but how wonderful to wake up and read his poems. Thank you so much for your curiosity, research, analysis. You’re a gift.

  2. george says:

    Another of the driving forces of Modernism at the time was the new “culture of therapy”. I suppose it’s inherent in such new ways to encapsulate as much of everything it can to make it as legitimate as can be. So when Owen was in hospital for shell shock and he met Siegfried Sassoon, Sassoon was in hospital for having thrown the medal he was awarded into the River Mersey, a sure sign of instability it seems.

    Also recall having read of Sassoon looking down at some of his fellow soldiers as they would go on and on, and write home, about how they had never felt so noble and had never before felt so great a purpose to their lives. What balderdash he thought, until he came to his first action and admitted the same feeling had welled up in him, overwhelmingly, so much so it felt like a religious experience.

    Okay, that’s all.

  3. red says:

    George – Ooh, very nice additions – I am not as familiar with Sassoon’s stuff. I like what you say about the influence of Freud – certainly felt in all the great Modernist writers – Yeats, Joyce, all those guys – trying to work on those multiple layers of consciousness.

    It’s amazing to me that Wilfred Owen could have this transcendent experience – realize he was a poet – churn out all these poems (which are now anthologized) – and then die at such a young age. Kind of remarkable.

  4. red says:

    Kate – thank you!

    Most of this information came from the introduction to him in the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry – which is a really generous volume, in that it doesn’t just give biographical information but also – cultural context – where does this dude fit in, etc.

  5. Kate says:

    Oh yes, that’s where I read it. I homeschool my kids and we read from our poetry collections each morning. When they say “read it again Mom” it gets copied into a 3 ring binder and we read those each day and they memorize them so effortlessly. Sharon Olds was read at my wedding and I couldn’t have gotten through my father’s death without her.

  6. red says:

    I met her!! She came to see a show I was in and we spoke afterwards. She’s amazing.

  7. mutecypher says:

    I may have recommended this in a different context, but Pat Barker’s novel “Regeneration” is a fictionalized account of Sassoon’s stay in the mental hospital, where he meets and mentors Wilfred Owen. The novel is excellent.

  8. Rinaldo says:

    Several of Wilfrid Owen’s poems, including all but one of the poems quoted above, are set to music in Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, first performed in the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral in 1962. The work sets the Latin Requiem liturgy, in grand orchestra-and-chorus style reminiscent of Verdi’s setting, but this is periodically interrupted by one or another of Wilfrid Owen’s poems, sung in English by tenor and baritone soloists with chamber orchestra, the poems questioning or challenging the liturgical words.

    It’s a very great work (admitting that I’m something of a Britten fanatic), one of the towering artistic achievements of our time.

    • sheila says:

      Rinaldo – wow, it sounds incredible. Do you have a recording of it that you recommend? Or has it been filmed? Would love to see it.

      • Rinaldo says:

        The recording conducted by Britten himself remains the classic. It has the three soloists he wrote it for: soprano from the USSR, tenor from the UK (his partner Peter Pears), baritone from Germany.

        I see that there are several live-concert videos available on YouTube. I don’t know them so I can’t say which are better. But I do recommend against a Derek Jarman film from some years back that uses the work merely as a soundtrack background for some irrelevant images he dreamed up.

    • Jessie says:

      I can’t second Britten’s War Requiem enough! If you are still interested in recommendations, I really enjoy this performance. If you feel like falling down the rabbit hole though, check this out as it contains some molecular elaboration and response to music and text and how they come together. Super interesting. And you can also read along!.

      This is a great post also — I didn’t know he had such a turn-around between his entry to and exit from war (although I suppose it’s typical). Sometimes Owen reaches a bit too far, complicates things too much for my taste (maybe it just reminds me of my own terrible teenage poetry). I prefer him direct and heartbreaking. When Mental Cases gets down to its inexorable therefores and thuses. Was it for this the clay grew tall? Bugles sang. etc.

      • sheila says:

        Jessie – so ready to go down the rabbit hole. Thank you so much for those links!!

        I like your thoughts on Owen. He is definitely young in his outlook – and can gild the lily a bit maybe, like a lot of young people do.

        His letter to his mother is amazing – it’s almost like poetry broke over his head like a wave.

  9. ted says:

    I really like your point about his role in modernity versus being a modernist. I had never really thought about it like that before. It is true, his forms are those of his ancestors, though with very modern content. I love the …piece of artillery poem – the juxtaposition of what he is observing with the classic rhyming of curse, rehearse, worse, disburse. Powerful.

    • sheila says:

      Right – he’s using archaic forms, traditional forms, to describe a totally new level of carnage – it’s just amazing!!

      • Guy says:

        Beautifully put. (And you entire post is wonderful). Thank you.
        I’d like to recommend David Jones’ “In Parenthesis” if you haven’t read it. (And if you have, forgive the presumption.)

  10. Aslan'sOwn says:

    “Anthem for Doomed Youth” and “Dulce et Decorum Est” are his two poems that seem to be anthologized most often; they’re the ones I’m most familiar with. I’d never read “Mental Cases” until now — wow: “purgatorial shadows,” “carnage incomparable and human squander,” “on their sense, Sunlight seems a bloodsmear . . . Dawn breaks open like a wound,” written a hundred years ago, expressed with alliteration and meter, yet so vividly apt in describing the horrors of war. “Those forms give his poems the sound of an elegy to a lost world” — well said. Thank you for sharing these; I in turn was able to read them aloud to my teenage daughter and we mused together about the juxtaposition of beauty and tragedy. “Pawing at us who dealt them war and madness” — such a quiet, haunting condemnation.

    • sheila says:

      Aslan’s Own – thank you for your thoughts. It’s very moving to me as well that these poems written a hundred years ago still have such resonance, feel so new.

      // I in turn was able to read them aloud to my teenage daughter and we mused together about the juxtaposition of beauty and tragedy. //

      That’s so beautiful.

  11. David Foster says:

    Paul Fussell’s ‘The Great War and Modern Memory’ is a thoughtful analysis of the effect of WWI on society, on literary, and on language itself. Very depressing but very worthwhile reading.

    A brilliant fictional portrayal of the impact of the War, especially the discontinuity between generations, is Remarque’s “The Road Back,” which is sort of a sequel his to “All Quiet.” I reviewed it here:

    https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/21350.html

  12. Kirinleaf says:

    We actually studied Owen’s poetry in high school – part of a term’s work on literature associated with WW1 (we also read and watched Peter Weir’s Gallipoli). As high school was quite a while ago I can’t remember what else we did, but Wilfred Owen has never left me.

  13. KathyB says:

    In 1986 I was student teaching. This class of high achievers had a visitor coming, a poet in residence for a week. They were going to write poetry. The visitor had a book of Vietnam poetry titled Forced Marching to the Styx.

    I tried to prepare them by having them read some British poetry that fit well with his. The World War I poets fit him like a glove. As a contrast (and perhaps a warning) we began with the glorification of war in The Charge of the Light Brigade.

    Our visitor had a poem titled Letter to My Infant Son like Coleridge. Bob was happy with the prep and the students had a good week. They read samples of his work along side the Brits. Seniors read British lit in Kentucky in those days, may still.

    As a senior in high school in 1969-70 with an older brother in Vietnam, Wilfred Owen and his contemporaries touched my soul. Still do.

  14. Jenna says:

    I’ve had a soft spot for Owen ever since I saw the film version of Pat Barker’s novel “Regeneration,” which I had to watch because it had Johnny Lee Miller in it. As a very deep and intellectual teen I memorized “Dulce et Decorum Est” and in one of my more dramatic and political moments of teenager hood transcribed it onto the wall in the girls bathroom!

    • sheila says:

      I haven’t seen Regeneration – wow, I must rectify that!

      // transcribed it onto the wall in the girls bathroom! //

      Oh my God, that RULES.

  15. Jenna says:

    I’m delighted to report that “Regeneration” is on Amazon Prime! It’s been ages since I’ve seen it! I’m working from the couch today….

    I was a sophomore in 2001. I have a vivid memory of listening to some boys in study hall talk about how eager they were to enlist, to kill terrorists, etc. The movie, the poems they all hit at just the right moment for me. And it seemed very necessary that I write that poem in the bathroom.

  16. Myrtle says:

    This is very off-topic, but I’m taking advantage of the umbrella topic of ‘War’.

    I watched a YouTube piece on Lord Thomas Cochrane, and I’m obsessed. I’m having trouble with the link, but it’s called Thomas Cochrane: Craziest Sea Captain In History (indeed!). He is an absolute delight of a historical figure. Horatio Horblower & (especially) Jack Aubrey are based on him. But it’s one of those ‘real-life is crazier than fiction’ things.

    I’ve now listened to three podcasts/ talks about him, and I keep cracking up at his audacity. Like, you just have to laugh. “Oh Thomas, you nutter, I can’t believe that worked. Oh Thomas, of COURSE you fought with *another* high ranking figure. Oh Thomas, serve you right for having a son more fearless than even yourself.”

    Anyway, I think you and your regular readers would like him. He’s a great deal of fun. Which isn’t the first word that usually comes to mind re: the Napoleonic Wars lol.

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