CHAPTER VII CONCLUSION The English poetry of World War I has often been regarded as an isolated phenomenon of limited literary consequence though there is a striking newness in the themes and style of the trench poems which can be related to the modern tendencies and techniques; and Wilfred Owen stands supreme among the trench poets. He has established a norm for the concept of war poetry and permanently coloured the view of the Great War for later generations. He is always a living poet to the modem generation. But it is unfortunate that critics of Owen have marginalized his work by pushing it into the cul-de-sac known as war poetry. His poetry is so closely linked with his death, his sentiments, and the heroic cloak that posterity has draped around his ghost, that a balanced assessment of his actual achievement and contribution as a poet has been delayed.. One ploy has been to scale Owen s poetry down. Many critics opine that modernism was already in vogue, and nowhere did Owen fit in. F.R. Leavis suggested that Owen had no part in the new start that the Eliot-Pound revolution in technique gave to British poetry. 1 Since Leavis is using Eliot s assumption about the reordering of tradition, Owen is automatically put aside because he didn t so much reorder poetic tradition as invert its implicit values. The problem of a revaluation of Owen s poetry arose from the need to view it in the wider context of the modem poetic 222
tradition in England. That there was a striking newness in the themes and style of his poetry has been admitted by critics but whether this newness can be related to the modern tendencies is a question left unanswered. In this work attention has been focused upon Owen as a true revolutionary poet, opening up new fields of sensitiveness for his successors. The English poetic tradition has been traced in detail in Chapter-I. Beginning with Georgian themes and style, the twentieth century inaugurated no revolution in English poetry. The Victorian trend passed unbroken into the Edwardian poetry. The poets, by and large and more often than not, treated personal themes in romantic manner and often used cliche-ridden imagery to describe beauties of nature, the delights of young love, and the quiet life all around. But Owen being at the Front and faced with the realities of war broke through the poetical and the conventional to originality and truthfulness. This was the moment when there was no longer honey for tea. Poetry was lifted from an early declining tradition to a new rising one which characterizes Modem Poetry, with its satiric strain,. He noted and observed that there was aimlessness and futility about the whole war. He attacked the civilians, generals, and politicians as well as the profiteers, capitalists and material values. In Owen s poetry we have that sort of satiric strain which characterizes modem poetry with all complexities of its technique integrating the sublime and the ridiculous (Chapter III). He is the master of the satirist s art of juxtaposition, of yoking together two different ideas to underline a view point with humour or bitterness. 223
The satire which began with Sassoon in war poetry was carried ahead by Wilfred Owen and its purpose was masterly achieved. Further, Wilfred Owen carried satiric strain nearer to disgus, culminating into visionary compassion; that is to say to a point where it could be taken up by later modem poets (Chapter IV) Owen s poetry, which presents a true picture of the modern situation - disillusionment, inhumanity and hopelessness - is central to the prophetic poetry of the present age. When the war had sufficiently brutalized and decivilized men, the poet built up a faith which wa< poetically and emotionally satisfying and called forth the positive feelings of love and pity. Pity, which for the men who were suffering and could not speak was quite natural, and it further merged with the concept of love and produced something like a religion of humanity. J.M. Cohen has rightly said that the final companionship and compassion of the trenches provided the warpoet a way out from the cunning passages and contrived corridors of life in isolation which baffled T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land. " This feature of Owen s poetry not only anticipates the poety of the twenties and the thirties, it is also appealing to our age of science and technology which tends to shed old values and beliefs. Wilfred Owen warns us of the ill-effects of the misuse of scientific technology on man and nature. Reeling back into the beast which has been a major theme of Yeats s The Second Coming, Eliot s The Waste Land and Edith Sitwell s Gold Coast Customs, was already pointed out by Owen in The Show which Blunden calls almost the hieroglyph of the end or denial of our civilization J 224
In another regard Owen was like the modems in his use of myth in poetry. The war-tom world was described through vision, through biblical, classical and mythological events and through symbolism. This device is conspicuous almost in every poem Wilfred Owen wrote. His poetry offers us such a vision, for a warning at once terrible and salutary; but he is too true a poet not to have recognised that peace is something other than the avoidance of war, and the destestation of war is not enough to assure us of it. In his poetry, as we find in Shakespeare s plays, there is always a message, though not explicit but implicit, and the message has an everlasting value. Owen exposes how man has abrogated his concern for his fellow men, as well as for the natural world that has been turned against him. He mocks false dreams of beauty in art, which are contrasted ironically with war-tom reality and thus calls into question those ideologies which have assumed nature to be an everrenewable subject for Romantic art as well as an everlastingly renewable resource for man. Owen was a poet utterly dedicated to a task beyond all thoughts of himself or indeed of poety for its own sake. And this is the wider vision (Chapter-V) that accounts for the impersonality theory of poetry or the poet and persona concept so special to Modern Poetry. Owen by circumstances and inner impulse, discarded the personal heresy for impersonality which was very much advocated for and practised by T.S. Eliot and later became almost an axiom in modem poetry. The main import of Owen s poetry is in its demonstration that love in any genuine form, such 225
as platonic comradeship - as against ideological forms - occurs onl\ to the extent that all human beings are equal, even if this equal it} is based on a common possible fate, that is, death in war. His insights into the hollowness of received ideas about the nature o ' sexual love have become part of our late twentieth century recognition that romance is a construct which, in its fostering o ' the false importance of the notions of physical beauty and sexuai appeal, has proved self-defeating particularly for women. Owen commends himself to post-war poets largely bee ruse they feel themselves to be in the same predicament. As Jon S lkin has pointed out, what connects the war poets with our time is, among other things, the inescapable war - not only as they were committed to realizing the terror of their conditions, but as tiose conditions are relevant to poets now. 4 Owen died young and.in his death we lost a poet of rare force. His discovery of final assonances in place of rhyme has marked a new age in poetry (Chapter VI). He invented a peculiar type of rhyme to aid him in the expression of that prevailing emotion of disgust, of weariness, of illusion, of insistence on the bleak realities which he was determined to drive home. He substituted for vowel identity with its pleasing music, a consonuntal identity which neither pleases nor is intended to please, except will that remote pleasure we derive from a recognition of a true adaptation of means to ends. His intention has always bee 1 to chastise our sensibilities, as it were, to shake and wake us; and it has been done, not infrequently through certain alliterative devices., 226
but regularly in the old Saxon metres. And our ear being now tuned to vowel-rhyme, the poet avails himself of our disappoinxnent to increase the biting severity of his strokes; and so, profiting not only by what he gives but also by what he withholds, he geis an effect of total desolation. Besides, he made remarkable changes in vocabulary, imagery and versification. The very make of his language is hard and remorseless or strange and sombre as he wills. The most useful and pervasive innovation of Owen s poetry is the employment of everyday speech with which came the conversational rhythm. His half-rhyme or para-rhyme is enough to justify it is an innovating factor in modern poetry. Thus Owen succeeded in creating a new idiom and new soimd patterns which express typically modem states of mind and yet also bear a definite relation to traditional forms. Para-rhyme itself has become a characteristic of modem verse. As a matter of fact, Owen was testing a new poetic technique which seemed to promise some measure of form and discipline. One of the traditional tests of a poet is the number of outstanding memorable lines he has written. This test Owen passes triumphantly. The lines of his which stick most in our memory can be divided into two types. The first of these is highly poetical, in the grand manner, reminding us of Keats - a poet with whom Owen had a great deal more in common than an early death. The second type is restrained, often witty in the seventeenth-certurv sense, always ironical. We find it perpetually reclining in his work. Owen is popular not only with revolutionary or war poets but W.H. 227
Auden and Dylan Thomas were also very much inspired by his poetry. There can be no doubt that the poetry of Wilfred Owen constitutes a vital link in the evolution of the poetic tradition in England between the Georgians and the Modems. His poetry 1 as a clear right to be considered part and parcel of modem poetry. It is not only in subject matter but also in manner that the novelty ct his poetry consists. His poetry contributed to the development cf modem poetry by an urgency to introduce into it the ma crial which was pressed so vividly upon him. As the new ma erial needed a profound linguistic invention Owen did not fail in this respect; and thus, his contribution to the evolution of me dern sensibility and techniques, to elucidate which has been the main object of the present reassessment of Wilfred Owen s poetry, cannot be denied. His unsentimental pity, his savage and sacred indignation are the best of our inheritance, and it is for the present generation to see that they are not wasted. 228
REFERENCES 1. New Bearings in English Poetry, London, Chatto and Windus, 1932, repr. with Retrospect5 1950; Hannondsworth, Penguin, 1972, pp. 57-8. 2. J.M. Cohen, Poetry of this Age, Arrow Books, London, 1959, p.139. 3. Edmund Blunden, War Poets, 1914-18 (Writers and their work series, London, Longman, 1958), pp. 36-7. 4. Jon Silkin, Out of Battle, The Poetry of the Great War, Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 347. 229