Poetry Of Wilfred Owen

Biography of WILFRED OWEN - 1893-1918 #

Wilfred was the eldest of four children in lower middle class Anglican family. His father was a poorly paid railway executive. He was close to his mother (Susan) who discouraged his interest in girls and encouraged him to be a scholar (clergyman or teacher).

Owen became a clergyman’s assistant (Sunday School teacher) and elementary school teacher

He became a tutor in France (Bordeux). He was here when war broke out so he was not part of original fervour in England.

He was not inclined to join up until a year later and enlisted October 1915 – then spent 14 months training in England.

Owen was commissioned into Manchester Regiment (1916) as second lieutenant.

He was in France in worst winter of war. His total battle experience on which poems are based was four months with five weeks in the line.

He was Injured and suffered shell shock with violent nightmares about war.

  • Became involved with other ‘war’ poets Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves.

  • Went back to France to the front with a strong feeling he would never return.

  • Killed seven days before the Armistice.

LITERATURE OF W.W.I #

A phenomenon in itself. Earlier “war literature” had generally been heroic, (possibly because literate people of earlier ages saw little of sustained, aggressive action).

W.W.I. - unique literary response especially from participants i.e. soldiers on the field. Poems are only small sample of huge volume of literary material.

Writings from the early stages of war mirrored belief that Allied victory would be achieved quickly and easily. By the time Owen joined it was clear that the nature and duration of the war had changed dramatically. Literature then became stark and realistic with little heroism or national pride.

It was the poets whose first hand accounts of the battle that changed our perspectives of war forever.

Auden as a young man, saw that the first world war had just blown everything apart. It was no longer possible to write about daffodils or the skylark; the only legitimate subject was the war, the mindless carnage and waste.

Auden was too young to capture the reality of that, but he managed to depict the despair and haunting images torturing humanity as a result of the barbarity.

Churchill was not convinced; he told the poet Siegfried Sassoon that

‘the present war…had brought about inventive discoveries which would ameliorate the condition of Mankind’—in sanitation, for example.

Twenty years later, he still thought the same. He told his private secretary in October 1940,

‘A lot of people talked a lot of nonsense when they said wars never settled anything; nothing in history was ever settled except by wars.’”

WWI marked a seismic shift in how we viewed heroic death. The classical depiction is tragic, but celebratory; willingly and joyfully sacrificing yourself for a greater cause.

Confronted, suddenly and starkly with the senseless and meaningless slaughter of thousands who died “like cattle”, in the face of industrialised war, a new immersive picture emerged of the brutal ugly non-heroic nature of young men needlessly giving up their lives because the Generals had little idea of the real conditions and consequences of their war strategies.

Yeats, cocooned in his classical mindset, rejected the WWI war poets because he:

“felt they had made their suffering their own. Passive suffering is not a theme for poetry. In all the great tragedies, tragedy is a joy to the man who dies. In Greece the tragic chorus danced. If war is necessary it is best to forget the suffering, as we do the discomfort of fever, remembering our comfort at midnight when our fever fell.”

On the contrary, according to Warwick McFadyen, the war poets proved Yeats comprehensively wrong, by demonstrating that their was art in death and suffering. The soldiers found in the desolation of France and spirits in the war hospital wards, a voice transcendent.