Name: - Insiyafatema Alvani
Roll No: - 11
Semester: - 2 (Batch 2022-24)
Enrolment number: - 4069206420220001
Paper No: - 110
Paper name: - History of English Literature – From 1900 to 2000
Paper code: - 22403
Topic: - Wilfred Owen as a Soldier and Poet
Submitted to: - Smt. S. B. Gardi Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
Email Address: insiyafatemaalvani@gmail.com
Wilfred Owen as a Soldier and Poet
About Wilfred Owen:
Born 18 March 1893
Died 4 November 1918
Wilfred Owen is widely regarded as one of Britain’s greatest war poets. Writing from the perspective of his intense personal experience of the front line, his poems, including ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ and ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, bring to life the physical and mental trauma of combat. Owen’s aim was to tell the truth about what he called ‘the pity of War’. Born into a middle-class family in 1893 near Oswestry, Shropshire, Owen was the eldest of three. His father, Tom Owen, was a railway clerk and his mother, Susan, was from a fervently religious family. In 1915, Owen enlisted in the army and in December 1916 was sent to France, joining the 2nd Manchester Regiment on the Somme. Within two weeks of his arrival he was commanding a platoon on the front line. In the midst of heavy gunfire, he waded for miles through trenches two feet deep in water with the constant threat of gas attacks. The brutal reality of war had a profound effect on him, as he recounted in letters to his mother. His poems ‘The Sentry’ and ‘Exposure’ record specific ordeals of this time. Virtually he is unknown as a poet in his lifetime; most of Owen’s poems were published after his death. Aware that his work could do nothing to help his own generation, he succeeded in warning the next, his poetic legacy having a major impact on attitudes to war.
Education:
He began attending technical school as a day boy. In September 1911 he was enrolled at London University. From October 1911 to summer 1913, he was at Dunsden Vicarage, Oxfordshire as pupil and lay assistant to the reverend Herbert Wigan. In August 1913 he was assigned as English tutor at the Berlitz School of languages, Bordeaux. In July 1914, he left Berlitz School, became tutor to two boys in a catholic family in Bordeaux. In September 1915, he returned to England and was commissioned in the Manchester regiment on October 22. On December 29, 1916, he sailed to France on active service, attached to Lancashire Fusiliers. On March 19, 1917 he was sent to the 13 casualty clearing station.
Death and legacy
In September 1918, Owen returned to the front during the final stages of the war. He fought a fierce battle and was awarded the Military Cross for his bravery. He was killed, at the age of 25, while leading his men across the Sambre and Oise Canal near Ors, on 4 November.
Owen as a War Poet:
The major themes in Owen's poetry of war that explicitly dominate his poems are included in the subject of war itself, pity, tragic death, horrors and protest against war. Subjects in his poetry are obviously shown in his famous speech "My subject is War, and the pity of War...”.
However, each literary piece has its themes which revolve around the war and its aftermaths. Owen was talented in composing his war poems, for he added unique artistic methods that his poems were characterized by. For instance, the poet expresses a distinguished outlook in using his poetry as a testimony. He utters the realities of the calamitous events of war; such narration seeks to give the real picture of the evilness of war and warn people implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, against war. Sometimes, the poet depends on using the child-like strategy to describe his emotion. He inserts child-like sketches in some letters that were sent to his brother Harold. He in a smart but painful attempt wants to evolve body parts into child-like sketches or even in a verbal witticism. Another characteristic about the poet is that he uses some classic works as references in his poems. Owen employed some of the Homeric classic myths in his poem 'Strange Meeting'.
The imagination of Owen is saturated with horrors and bloody war pictures. The war experience launched his imagination and completely captivated his mind. His imagination is so active to respond and create a sense of responsibility towards various public categories all around the world. According to C. Day Lewis, a revolution and a force in Owen's mind inspires him to choose his subject of war precisely. It seems that the life, background, and family, alongside the military service have had the largest impact on developing his imagination. There are different aspects in Owen's poetry. Spiritually, his poetry can be understood in terms of warning, and protesting against war. Several of his poems reflect the nature of divinity and morality. Kendall says: “There is a conception of a 'whole edifice' in Owen's plans for 'Disabled and Other Poems', but …was obliged to note 'how very different all his poems are from each other”. In general, the aspects of social, political, emotional and imaginative scope are tackled in narrative, descriptive, and didactic terms of Owen's war poetry.
Owen as a Soldier in WWI:
Wilfred Edward Owen is an English soldier- poet. Owen returned to his battalion early in April. In May he was sent again to the 13 casualty clearing station, and from there to 41 stationary hospital. In June, he went into No. 1 General Hospital, from which he was returned to England, arriving at the Welsh Hospital, Netley, about June 18. On June 26, 1917 he was evacuated to Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh. In November 1917, he was discharged from Craiglockhart: posted to northern Cavalry Barracks, Scarborough. In August 1918, he returned to France for active service and in October he was awarded the Military Cross.
During Owen's life, only four of his poems were published, while his celebrity was posthumous. The authenticity and grandeur in the language of his poems, the blending of harsh realism with a sensation, and the portrayal of horrors, proved that Owen is a remarkable poet and his poetry is mature as well. It was not a gradual development that made his work mature, but a kind of revolution in mind that enabled him to recognize his subject clearly: “war and the pity of war”. This subject inspired Owen to write his poems that contributed to a radical change of citizens' attitudes towards the war: not to think of war as anything but evil. There were different experiences and circumstances that had an impact on developing Owen's talent in writing poetry. Seemingly, the tour in trenches during his military activities produced the emotional and spiritual aspects. Owen also was in admiration of the English poet, Keats, who influenced his writing verse in a pseudo- Keatsian manner. Owen's father was a man of adventurous spirit, whereas his mother was raised in a Calvinistic religious doctrine, emphasizing the omnipotence of God and the salvation of the elect by God's grace only, and a rigidly Victorian atmosphere. It was believed that this contradictory nature of his parents was behind the tensions between opposites that often create a poet, and develop his mind. Furthermore, the cultured atmosphere in Owen's home had a strong impact on the rapid development of his writings. During his military service he was writing letters to his family, showing his childish feelings to his mother, and the sense of responsibility toward his sister and younger brothers. Owen's sense of responsibility for his younger members of the family and for his widowed mother embodied his feeling as a soldier and poet towards his men and towards all soldiers on the front.
While working in Dunsden for a little wage, he was conducting several tours among the rural slums there and was reared hard against some facts of life: misery, ailment, and poverty. This experience must have rang the bells in his mind, and seemingly left a pragmatic impression which obliged him to look at the real world. He had reported in detail that he felt depressed about his future and had no specific conviction as to what he should do with his talent. When war broke out, Owen was living in a rural society. At the beginning, Owen opposed the war in a violent and deadly serious manner. He had been barely influenced by the war and his firm belief was that the war is a severe annoyance of private life. But after the first witness of a real case of an injured soldier in Bordeaux Hospital, he in a ruthless and sharp tone recounted the actualities of war. Then he was enlisted in the military service, and Literary Endeavour
The military expressions impacted his language in terms of sharpness and toughness which mostly featured his writings. According to Kendall, Owen used poetry as a way of therapy. Owen's war poetry resides 'in the pity,' he referred to pity, for friend and foe alike, at a point where the real experience should have overcome any other kind of literary celebration, such as glories, heroism, and patriotism. He reinforced this vision in that the best war poetry is a combination of bitterness and nostalgia as it was seen arising out of the grand disillusionment of the First World War.
Owen here struggles with the paradoxical notion of sense experience: on the one hand, it is intensely private and stubbornly resists translation, and on the other hand, for it to be shared and communicated, it has to create a retrospective narrative. The first experience that happened to Owen with 'the actualities of war' was in a hospital in France. He wrote a letter to his brother Harold characterized by realism, pity and writing as testimony. At the same time, there was a full involvement of the body in pain formulated into child-like sketches or verbal witticism. However, the rich diversity in Owen's imagination, drawn back to Owen's pre-war letters were saturated with depictions of illness and pain. Owen's war poetry which is widely attributed to the actualities of trench life, in large, formed the 'modern memory' of the war. The vivid images of darkness, guns, mud, rain, gas, bullets, shells, barbed wire, rats, lice, cold, and trenches enriched the modern war poetry.
'Dulce et Decorum Est':
'Dulce et Decorum Est', is one of Owen's major poems. Harold Bloom notes that the first draft of “Dulce et Decorum Est” was composed in October, 1917 at Craiglockhart Hospital. It was published posthumously in 1920. The title is an ironic allusion to a line taken from a Latin poem for the Roman poet Horace, “Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori”, which means it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. Owen wrote the poem as a response to the patriotic poetess Jessie Pope whose recruiting poems encouraging many young men to fight in the futile war. Ironically, Owen referred to Jessie Pope in line 25 using the term 'My Friend', but how come to be a friend while her poetic works performed as an enemy toward humankind. The poem is known as 'a gas poem' in which Owen employed both senses of experience and language in their extreme limits. Although the phrase 'gas poem' does not fully convey the aspects of poetic and thematic issues, the desperate moments during and after the gas attack weep through the whole lines of the poem. Bloom thinks that, “Owen's goal from such a title is to attack the concept that sacrifice is sacred, and to destroy the glamorized decency of the war”. In 'Dulce et Decorum Est', Owen in a scenic way, infers the details of the instant and direct effects of a gas attack.
"Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime"
Moving from the bloodied feet to the bloodied mouth of the soldier, he discussed different main points in the subject of war: night march, a gas attack, and traumatic neurosis. The soldiers were fatigued and exhausted by the battle, so they withdrew from the front lines to the back lines of the battle to have a short break and to rearrange themselves before going back to the battle field. They were extremely tired to the limit that they did not feel the falling down of the bombs, and did not hear the explosion sound of Endeavour the gas projectiles dropped behind them. They tried to put gas masks on quickly, but one soldier had not enough energy and was late to put the mask on in time. Owen kept a helpless and powerless observer from behind the saving panels of the mask to the situation in which the man had no ability to breathe in a sea of gas. What is the value of a life restricted in trivial and cheap-price mask panels? Those panels represent the distance between life and death. However, the brutal vision of a soldier agony of dying through the gas haunted the poet in all his dreams.
"My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori"
Owen did not save any effort in portraying the terror of the gas attack. In a genius dramatic outlook, he employed his harsh commentating knowledge flavored with both tones and cadences in using a reportage, direct description, and documentary portrayal by which he made the distance between the miserable scene of the gas attack and the reach of reader's imagination so close. What made the opening of 'Dulce et Decorum Est' so exceptional is that in the first line of the first stanza, Owen takes us directly to the field yard. The scene is vivid and live, and brings the body into the field of vision against the surreal backdrop of the gas flares and the sound of the 'Five-nines'.
Conclusion:
The singular bond that ties all the poems discussed earlier is Owen’s attitude to war. Through his poetry, Owen has given a voice to protest against war that desolated the life of people over a long time. He inserted the techniques of irony, rhetorical questions, sarcasm, and sometimes the direct denunciation to reveal his rejection of war, in particular, the war he witnessed: the First World War. Apparently, his first-hand experience in the trenches as a soldier had a critical role in developing his poetic talent. His poetic writing depicted the real painful side of life. Owen accused the politicians who were, in his opinion, the reason for the bloody armed struggles in the world. He conveyed an exceptional message to those who thought that the war is merely a title of heroics and glory. He made them see the other evil side of the war. At the same time, he warned them against contributing in the emergence of wars by one way or another. He bore his responsibility toward this case and overtly announced that it is not a kind of pride to die for the country. He hoped that the war would stop in the future but he died before. In the preface of his posthumously published Poems, he pledges that his aim is to capture not the glory of war but the unmentioned or desperately overlooked ‘pity’ inherent in it.
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References -
Muttalib , Fuad Abdul. “(PDF) War Poetry: Wilfred Owen as a Soldier and Poet - Researchgate.” ResearchGate , July 2019, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335207784_WAR_POETRY_WILFRED_OWEN_AS_A_SOLDIER_AND_POET.
Stallworthy, Jon. "Owen, Wilfred Edward Salter (1893–1918), poet." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 01. Oxford University Press. Date of access 31 Mar. 2023, <https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-37828>
Nice Work 👏
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