But when, during the great productive period, he sought to write or finish such poems, we often notice in them a regression to his immature manner. It is interesting to speculate upon what subjects might have fired his imagination and possessed his whole mind, as did the war experience. Would the vein of savage indignation prove exhausted, or might Owen have found it renewed in the struggle against social injustice which animated some of his poetic successors ? It seems possible; but his honesty, fervour and sensuousness might have been directed elsewhere to produce a Catullan kind of love-poetry. My own conviction is that, whatever poetry he turned to, he would have proved himself in it a poet of a high order. His dedication was complete: he passionately wanted to survive the war, so that he might continue to write poetry.

Certainly, in the writings of his last two years, he showed himself both a serious poet and an increasingly self-critical one. If we follow the successive drafts of the poems over which he worked longest—Anthem for Doomed Youth, for instance*—we can see how admirably he kept sharpening the language, focusing ever more clearly his theme. Clumsiness there sometimes is, in these later poems; but nothing facile, and no shallow amateurism. Even his juvenilia, undistinguished though for the most part they are, present one promising feature—a gift for sustaining, in the sonnet form particularly, what musicians call legato—, for keeping the movement of the verse running unbroken through an elaborate syntactical structure.

The language and rhythms of Owen’s mature poetry are unmistakably his own: earlier influences have been absorbed, and we recognize in the style an achieved poetic personality. But it was achieved not solely through the impact of war: the seeds of it can be found in such early lines as

… the lie

Of landscapes whereupon my windows lean

or

I kissed the warm live hand that held the thing

or

For us, rough knees of boys shall ache with revrence

or

I shall be bright with their unearthly brightening.

Although his later work was largely cleared of derivativeness and false poeticism, Owen was not a technical innovator except in one respect—his consistent use of consonantal end— rhymes (grained/ground; tall/toil). For a detailed discussion of this device, I would refer the reader to Chapter Six of D. S. R. Welland’s book on Owen.* Consonantal rhyme, and other forms of assonance, are common in Welsh poetry and had been used previously in English by Vaughan, Emily Dickinson and Hopkins. There is no evidence that Owen had read any of the three last; nor could he read Welsh—his parents were both English and he was born in England. The first surviving poem in which he experiments with consonantal rhyme is From My Diary, July 1914, while Has your soul sipped? (see note, p. IIS) may be another early experiment. A letter of April 10th, 1916, also shows his mind running on it: “We had Night Operations again. I was isolated scouting—felt like scooting.” Dr. Welland puts up an interesting case for Owen’s having been introduced to this device by the poetry of Jules Romains, a volume of which, making frequent use of accords, came out in 1913.†; On the other hand, as Welland recognizes, Owen may well have discovered it for himself: a young poet’s head is full of chiming sounds: it is a matter of nerve and skill, not necessarily of outside authority, whether he comes to use, deliberately and successfully, chimes which to orthodox ears would sound discordant.

Again, it has been noticed how Owen tends to have a lower-pitched vowel following a higher one as its rhyme; and this has been explained as a method of stressing the nightmare quality or the disillusionment of the experience about which he was writing. It may be so. But, lacking a theoretical statement by Owen about his rhyme, we should be cautious in attributing its workings to any methodicalpractice. Poets, when they have such urgent things to say as Owen had, seldom attend so consciously to musical detail; the harmonies of the poem, and its discords, are prompted by the meaning rather than imposed upon it. Nevertheless, Dr. Welland is justified in saying that Owen’s consonantal rhyming “is right for this poetry because its note of haunting uneasiness, of frustration and melancholy, accords perfectly with the theme and the mood”.

By temperament and force of circumstances, Owen had led a solitary life, cut off from any close fraternity with other men, out of touch with the cultural movements of pre-war England. Shy and diffident as he was, this previous isolation must have heightened the sense of comradeship he felt when, in the army, he found himself accepted by his fellows and able to contribute to the life of a working unit. The old solitude was fertilized by the new fraternity, to enlarge his emotional and imaginative scope. Laurent Tailhade’s eloquently uttered pacifist beliefs had, no doubt, impressed themselves upon the young Owen; but I can find no evidence that Owen was influenced by his poetry. At the Craiglockhart War Hospital, Owen met a man whose poetry and pacifism appealed to him alike. Siegfried Sassoon brought out, in a way almost embarrassing to him, all the younger poet’s capacity for hero-worship: he had been a most gallant Company commander; he had written poems and a prose manifesto condemning the war in an uncompromising manner. No wonder Owen felt at first like a disciple towards him.

It was a sign of Owen’s integrity and growing independence as a poet that his work was not radically affected by his admiration for this new friend.