PREFACE. This thesis aims at reassessing the poetry of Wilfred Owen «

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Christopher Dorsey
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1 PREFACE This thesis aims at reassessing the poetry of Wilfred Owen «who, I think, was the best of all the poets of the Great War. He established a norm for the concept of war poetry and permanently coloured the view of the Great War for later generations. He was a poet of Wider Vision. He was very much impressed by Rabindranath Tagore and on several occasions he quoted Tagore s lines which occur in Gitanjali - When I go from hence let this be my parting word, that what I have seen is unsurpassable. These words decidedly refer to the quality and nature of Owen s experiences during the First World War of Whether those experiences were unsurpassable must have given all readers of Owen cause for thought, as the twentieth century has rolled by, piling horror upon horror. There is a need to debate to what extent Owen s moral and emotional reaction to his war experience was typical and admirable. We need to understand how Owen fits into the poetic debate about the meaning of the war, a debate started by Brooke, and challenged by Sorley and Sassoon. This is not a general study of First World War poetry. The over-riding aim of this study is to discuss Owen s poetry and its relevance to humanity. War has always played a vital role in the making of poetry; and so did the First World War ( ) too. It affected the sensibilities of English poets very profoundly and proved the turning point for many of them who hitherto had been writing contentedly in the old manner. In the beginning the poets, passionately desiring to give immediate and adequate expressions to the emotions which

2 were surging inside them, turned back to a tradition which had not yet wholly lost its glamour. Glamour and the crisis of the moment working together heightened the mood to the point of exaltation. And it was in such a mood many poets like Rupert Brooke saw war as a purifying, romantic experience and death as heroic. By the end of 1916 the war took such a heavy toll of mankind that a large number of young poets were removed from the scene before they reached maturity and unfortunately Wilfred Owen was one of them. Gradually when the war became static, high adventures and heroic spirits faded. The poets stared in the face of the War which was one of the grimmest and most brutalizing types of conflict man had ever had to endure. In their awareness of the horrors of warfare, of the unnecessary sacrifice of human life, there was a strong reaction against the placidity and escapism of the earlier Georgian poets. The poet who for posterity has most terribly summed up the tragedy of his generation was Wilfred Owen. He was the most disturbing of all the English war poets. He felt the thud of battle and a mysterious urge to unfold its horrid reality. He was soon overwhelmed by the anger on behalf of these who die as cattle ' and these are men whose mind the Dead have ravished. Though Owen died young like John Keats, his range in this short span of life is wide. He wrote bitter satires, touching and delicate elegiac poetry and such poems as speak directly to humanity and put the anguish of the individual soldier in a truly universal frame. He saw the truth of the war, and greater than that the vision of the war in its totality. Objective visualization of the war was possible for him because he did not allow his subjective element to

3 intrude too much to obscure a clear perspective of the Great War. He was gifted with a peculiar imaginative insight and searching vision which enabled him to interpret his reactions to war primarily in terms of objective experience. With considerable economy of means, Owen has placed the tragedy of an individual death on a plane of cosmic significance. Owen deserves to be considered as the exponent of a new kind of poetry that evokes a vast pity and combines all the force of a personal complaint with the objective power of a universal statement. In former centuries war poetry was not about war at all. It was epic as it was about the hero. Poets from Homer to Tennyson have presented war as a grand, spectacle and they kept in the background its brutality and futility. But the poetry of Wilfred Owen is real, absolutely concerned with war and its terrible consequences. It speaks for people and so it has intrinsic worth and permanent appeal. The first two chapters of this thesis are mainly introductory, the first presenting the premise of my study by way of introduction and the second showing how Owen s very literary stance was formed by a number of earlier and contemporary influences. The third chapter has been devoted to the satiric strain which found Owen s poetry its best medium. Owen refurbished the old tools of satire which had been out of favour with poets for more than a century. The fourth chapter has focussed on the visionary compassion in the poetry of Wilfred Owen who declared the poetry is in the pay In fact, for a poet of Owen s sensibility, the problems of man and society became the problem of his own heart. He dealt with

4 the larger life outside the individual - a life which is never without a close connection with as well as a direct and profound impact upon the individual s life. Thus the poet and his personal feelings have become inseperable parts of a universal theme. Chapter V is devoted exclusively to the wider vision which the poetry of Owen brings into focus. His poetry transcends the moods and issues of war-time disillusionment and becomes a great civilizing force. It is in this sense that Owen raised the lyric poetry to its highest and most nearly tragic level. The sixth chapter has dealt with Owen s technical innovation which is undoubtedly a significant contribution to modem poetry. And finally, the findings of my study have been summed up briefly in the seventh chapter, establishing that die poetry of Wilfred Owen has offered a body of literature which is genuine and breaks new ground in English poetry. I must express my deep sense of gratitude to the eminent scholars of Wilfred Owen and the poetry of the First World War. I am most profoundly indebted to my research guide, Dr. D.R. Singh, Reader and Head of the English Department, T.D. College, Jaunpur. I still regard him as my teacher, as but for his ever inspiring and never failing guidance it would have been difficult for me to proceed ahead with confidence and complete my thesis. I am equally indebted to my father-in-law, Late Pt. Ram As ray Dubey (Retd. Deputy Collector), for the unfailing help and the \cry valuable suggestions he gave me at the early stages of my work. I shall be failing in my duty if I do not express my gratitude to Dr. S.B. Shukla, formerly Professor at the University of Allahabad, who was good enough to go through the synopsis of this work and

5 to suggest many improvements. I would like to place here on record my thankfulness to my husband Captain Suprashant Dubey, for procuring useful books and journals for my use and also for obtaining photostat copies of about a dozen important and rare articles on Wilfred Owen from The National Library, Kolkata and The North-Eastern Hill University Library, Shillong. A debt of a more personal sort 1 owe to my daughter, Shuchi Dwivedi who always gave me moral support. My thanks are also due to my friends, relatives and Mr Jagdish Mishra as well who extended active cooperation throughout my work. I am still grateful to The National Library, Kolkata, The British Library, Delhi & Kolkata and Benaras Hindu University Library for the facilities I was provided in consulting books and journals. Vandana Dubey Lecturer, Dept, of English T.D. College, Jaunpur.

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