I am happy with Art. I believe in Science more wholeheartedly than in Art, but what good could I do in that way?

Music? If only I dare say Yes! I certainly believe I could make a better musician than many who profess to be, and are accepted as such.

… I love Music, Violin first. Piano next, with such strength that I have to conceal the passion for fear it be thought weakness …

My Temperament I have now no right to doubt. That I believe infallible; though it remains to know which, if any. Music, Painting, Sculpture, or Verse, is the most possible.

Letter of May 24th, 1914.

Sixteen months before this, Owen had written in an effervescent (and Keatsian) way.

For the first time in life, I feel I could fill volumes; if I once started to write. It would turn out a Philosophical Work, of course. Oh the irony of my old title of Philosopher !*. I have become one without knowing it. It is a far, far different thing from what I imagined of yore … My treatise on Philosophy would be a succession of interrogations from beginning to end.

Letter of January 24th, 1913.

When Owen went to live with the Leger family, things took a brighter turn. In August 1914 he was introduced to M. Laurent Tailhade—the first professional poet, so far as we know, he had ever met: the two struck up a friendship, Owen profiting by the older man’s encouragement and example. Tailhade, too, had been intended for the Church, but had lost his Christian belief. With his employer, Mme. Leger, Owen was on excellent terms, their relationship having an element of light-hearted flirtatiousness: but at this time Owen was still under-developed emotionally, his idealism, and a streak of the puritan acquired, perhaps, from his mother, holding him back from closer contacts with women. In an undated letter from Bordeaux he had written, “All women, without exception, annoy me, and the mercenaries … I utterly detest.” It is noticeable that, in his war poetry, Owen had no pity to spare for the suffering of bereaved women : even Greater Love sees women as not quite worthy of the men who are dying in France.

His two pupils were bright, high-spirited boys who gave him no trouble. Owen evidently had a gift for getting on well with the young, and an unsentimental approach to them. A letter of January 29th, 1913, from Dunsden, shows that he thought a good deal about child psychology and education, and was well aware how strong an influence he could exercise upon young minds; “Children are not meant to be studied, but enjoyed. Only by studying to be pleased do we understand them.” He adds later, with a prophetic foresight truer than he could have realized, “I am convinced that I hold under my tongue, powers which would shake the foundations of many a spiritual life.” Certainly, his spiritual influence on poets of my own generation was very great.

When war broke out, Wilfred Owen, a provincial himself, was living the life of a cultivated, French provincial society. He was now twenty-one—unsophisticated, inexperienced, still only intermittently sure of his vocation, but ardent and sensuous at the core. For a month or two, the war hardly touched him or the social circle in which he lived. His own attitude towards it was not that of a “swimmer into cleanness leaping” : it was nearer to that of certain Bloomsbury figures who resented the war as an unseemly disturbance of the private life ; but with this difference—that Owen’s protest was raw, violent, naïf, deadly serious :

I feel my own life all the more precious and more dear in the presence of this deflowering of Europe. While it is true that the guns will effect a little useful weeding, I am furious with chagrin to think that the Minds, which were to have excelled the civilization of two thousand years, are being annihilated— and bodies, the product of aeons of Natural Selection, melted down to pay for political statues.

Letter of August 28th, 1914.

A month later, Owen was for the first time brought up hard against the facts of war. The experience, since he had a poet’s inner toughness, proved salutary rather than traumatic. He visited a hospital in Bordeaux at which casualties had just arrived from the front—a hospital grievously ill prepared for such an emergency, with an inadequate water-supply, where he witnessed operations being performed without anaesthetics. In a letter of September 23 to his brother Harold, he wrote:

One poor devil had his shin-bone crushed by a gun-carriage wheel, and the doctor had to twist it about and push it like a piston to get out the pus … I deliberately tell you all this to educate you to the actualities of war.

The tone is ruthless and a little self-important; but Owen was a very young man, and young men do labour to educate their families. But there is a sharpness in the observation which comes like a premonition of the unrelenting factual truthfulness we find in Owen’s war poems: he wanted to shock, but never for the mere sake of shocking.

In general, his letters of the Bordeaux period show a greater interest in other human beings, and a considerable talent for sketching their externals, but no deep perception of their natures, nor any desire to see deep into them. He was still egocentric, as a young poet must be; still repeating his “need for study, intellectual training”; still oscillating between confidence and self-distrust over his vocation—on the one hand, “I seem without a footing on life; but I have one … I was a boy when I first realized that the fullest life liveable was a Poet’s” (letter of February 6th, 1915); on the other hand, “all last year and longer I have read no poetry, nor thought poetically” (letter of February 18th, 1915). At the beginning of 1915 Owen was seriously considering whether he should take up an opening in business. He seems to have had no thoughts yet of enlisting: in any case he was bound by his contract with the Legers to stay in France till the end of the summer. It was not till June I5th that he first stated his intention of joining up as soon as his tutorial engagement was over, and there is no indication in his letters home that he had felt any conflict or compunction about remaining a civilian.

He came home in August or September, was accepted for the Army in October, and trained with the Artists’ Rifles.