The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen Read Online

In a few satirical or colloquial poems, such as The Letter, The Chances, or The Dead Beat, we may perceive Sassoon’s influence; but Owen must have known that Sassoon’s ironic and robust satire was not for him, and he continued in the tragic-elegiac vein which he had started working before he met the other poet. What Sassoon gave him was technical criticism, encouragement, and above all the sense of being recognized as an equal by one whose work he respected; it meant the end of his isolation as an artist.

In a letter from which I have already quoted, Wilfred Owen described himself as “a conscientious objector with a very seared conscience”. He had come to see the war as absolutely evil in the agonies and senseless waste it caused: on the other hand, only as a combatant could he conscientiously and effectively speak for the men who were suffering from it. This conflict within himself, which Dr. Welland has discussed at length,* was a basic motive of the war poems. It is a conflict every honest poet must face under the conditions of modern total war; for, if he refuse to take any part in it, he is opting out of the human condition and thus, while obeying his moral conscience, may well be diminishing himself as a poet. This conflict is seldom overt in Owen’s war poetry, which, although it makes use of his personal experiences, is remarkably objective: his ‘seared conscience’ and his inward responses to that experience provided a motive power, not a subject, of the poetry.

Looking once again at this poetry, thirty-five years after I first read it, I realize how much it has become part of my life and my thinking—so much so that I could hardly attempt dispassionate criticism of it. Now, as then, I find Owen’s war poetry most remarkable for its range of feeling and for the striking-power of individual lines. “He’s lost his colour very far from here” would stand out even in a play by Shakespeare or Webster: “Was it for this the clay grew tall?” has a Sophoclean magnificence and simplicity. Ranging from the visionary heights of Strange Meeting or The Show to the brutal, close-up realism of Mental Cases or The Dead-Beat, from the acrid indignation of such poems as Dulce Et Decorum Est to the unsentimental pity of Futility or Conscious, and from the lyricism of The Send-Off to the nervous dramatic energy we find in Spring Offensive, the war poems reveal Owen as a poet superbly equipped in technique and temperament alike. He was not afraid to be eloquent; and because he was speaking urgently for others, not for selfaggrandisement, his eloquence never ballooned into rhetoric. The war experience purged him of self-pity and poetic nostalgia. During his great productive year, the pressure of his imaginative sympathy was high and constant, creating poems that will remain momentous long after the circumstances that prompted them have become just another war in the history books. They, and the best of his poems not directly concerned with war, are in language and character all of a piece.

The Text

The bulk of Wilfred Owen’s autograph poems are in the British Museum, to which they were presented by the Friends of the National Libraries in 1934. Other MS. drafts, and transcripts, are privately owned. My notes to the poems indicate the present whereabouts of all the drafts I have been able to trace. In the notes, I use the following abbreviations :

I have already paid tribute to the admirable work performed by Mr. Sassoon, Professor Blunden and Dr. Welland in tackling the textual problems set by the MS. drafts. Owen wrote a number of drafts and part-drafts of many of these poems, and it is not always possible to determine the order in which these drafts were composed. Where I have occasion to compare what we can be reasonably sure was his final draft with earlier ones, I indicate the former by BM (a), the latter by BM (b).

I have myself worked through all the available MS. material, seeking amongst the numerous deletions and variants with which some even of the final drafts face an editor, to discover Owen’s intention or to arrive at the most satisfactory text where that intention is not clear. In general, my text will not often be found to differ greatly from Blunden’s, though I have made a considerable number of small emendations to his : such changes, small or great, are pointed out in the notes.

In two poems, Blunden’s text differs from that in any of the extant drafts and I have been unable to trace a MS. source. The poems in question are The Unreturning and It is not Death. There can be no doubt that Professor Blunden had MS. authority for the versions he printed ; but unfortunately the material he collected for his edition has been dispersed, and he is unable to help me over this matter. His version of Shadwell Stair gives ‘lapping Thames’ for the ‘full Thames’ which appears in the only MS.