And yet, I will argue that pity’s transience in time pales in
significance before another limitation: its inability to survive without
attenuation beyond the limits of an exclusive community of mourners,
one predicated on the firsthand experience of combat. In this community,
the wounds of war that these elegies attempt to dress are neither
metaphorical nor transient. In very different ways, then, both Yeats and
Ramazani have implicitly recognized the war elegy’s problematic claim
to exceptionalism–that war (more specifically, the direct and unmediated
firsthand experience of combat) represents a qualitatively distinct
realm of human experience, the full knowledge of which is accessible
only to a few. It is this notion of the unbridged epistemological gulf
that exists in the highly fraught relationship between the combatant war
elegist and his civilian audience that I wish to investigate.
This distance exists to some degree in all elegies and, one might
even say, in all works of lyric poetry. Whether we conceive of the lyric
poem as the dramatic monologue of a fictive speaker or as a
patched-together collection of speech acts frustrating all attempts to
perceive a unified speaking persona, all poems exist in a social
register and must navigate the liminal space that separates poet and
audience, speaker and listener, writer and reader. If these models
represent the possible polarities of what we might call the lyric
experience, the elegy–at least as it has been represented in the English
tradition that includes Spenser’s “Astrophel” and certain eclogues of The Shephearde’s Calendar,
Milton’s “Lycidas,” and Shelley’s “Adonais”–most often functions as a
mediation of this space, construed as the affective and epistemological
distance between poet and reader. Specifically, the elegy works to
collapse this space by rendering the two as equal members of a unified
mourning community comprising a number of voices, both human and
anthropomorphized. Owen’s reaction against this tradition, I will argue,
consists primarily in his manipulation of the distance he imagines
between himself as a combatant elegist and his readers as members of a
mourning community–yet a community that he views as alternately
indifferent and hostile to the subject of his poems. In doing so, Owen
radically diverges from English elegiac tradition. It is this that most
fundamentally obstructs his poems’ achievement of elegiac mourning and
turns his elegies into anti-elegies.
Owen’s generic transformation, then, is an explicitly antisocial
performance in which he sets out to destabilize the communal nature of
poetic mourning in the pastoral elegy, a genre in which both poet and
reader must move together along an erratic psychological trajectory
toward the promised consolation. In his landmark study The English Elegy,
Peter Sacks argues that the elegy achieves this consolation only within
the framework of a communal performance, and hence employs a variety of
conventions and staging devices to move the mourning community beyond a
mere expression of melancholic grief. As he writes:
The emphasis on the drama, or “doing,” of the elegy is thus part of
the crucial self-privileging of the survivors, as well as a way of
keeping them in motion, ensuring a sense of progress and egress, of
traversing some distance. For a stationary poet that distance may be
figurative and purely psychological, but it is crucial to any successful
mourning. Indeed, few elegies or acts of mourning succeed without
seeming to place the dead, and death itself, at some cleared distance
from the living.
There are, thus, two types of distance at work in the elegy, although
Sacks only mentions one. The first, which I have already described, is
the epistemological distance between the elegist, who is represented as
the most deeply affected of the mourners, and the reader, who is often
envisioned as a disinterested voyeur of the mourning drama. This type of
distance rarely figures prominently in the work of traditional elegy,
in which staging devices and generic conventions–such as the “use of
repetition and refrains,” the funereal procession, the poet’s outbreak
of angry questioning and supplication, and “traditional images of
resurrection,” among other features identified by Sacks–work to overcome
the disjunction between the elegist’s firsthand knowledge of the dead
and the reader’s relative ignorance. The elegist combines these tropes
with more familiar manifestations of poetic artifice, such as the
pathetic fallacy, to stage the elegy as a highly self-conscious
performance that purports to master the trauma it laments. Having
effectively closed the distance separating them, the poet can then lead
the reader, along with the rest of his poetically conceived mourning
community, to extend the second type of distance Sacks describes: the
one we must maintain between ourselves, as survivors, and the dead, for
the elegy to achieve its consolatory end.
But as a combatant-poet convinced of the singularity of his war
experience, Owen is not a traditional elegist. He is not interested in
closing the epistemological distance between poet and reader, but seeks
rather to extend it, departing from the conventions established by his
poetic predecessors. Unable or unwilling to move beyond the trauma of
his war experience, Owen writes in the preface to his collected works:
Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.
My subject is War and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity.
Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory.
They may be to the next.
In the war poems he wrote before his untimely death–a mere seven days
shy of the armistice–Owen appears to have become the sort of stationary
poet that Sacks describes, stuck in the re-experiencing of his own
trauma. Unable to traverse the space between war front and home front,
combatant and civilian, poet and reader, Owen works instead to fortify
its boundaries, to obstruct our entrance into poems that otherwise seem
eminently accessible with language and imagery that are at once familiar
and alien, inviting and estranging. His poems often promise, yet
ultimately preclude, our participation in the elegiac performance, thus
negating our claim to consolation.
However, though he rejects the traditional social model of poetic
mourning, Owen nonetheless becomes a successful poetic mourner through a
complicated series of displacements and replacements, which enable him
to substitute the anxiety and fright of passive experience with objects
and actions that transform passivity into agency. To put it another way,
because Owen cannot effect his own psychological movement as an elegiac
mourner, he displaces his readers instead, rejecting them, forcing them
out of the mourning community only to summon them back and discard them
once more. For Owen, this act of generic transformation allows him to
modulate, on his own terms, the distance between himself as a combatant
war-poet and his reader, envisioned as the disinterested and, thus,
complicit civilian. Doing so enables Owen to restructure the passivity
of his war trauma into another sort of elegiac performance–a partial
reenactment of Freud’s fort-da game played by a child casting
away and retrieving small objects–which enables him to stage his mastery
of a trauma that has, until now, eluded him. It also enables him to
control his readers’ access to the “pity” of his poems. In this respect,
Owen’s poetry gradually yet systematically alters the elegy’s social
purpose by impeding its historical function: the achievement of communal
consolation in the face of mortal loss. What remains is an elegy that
is anti-elegiac, anti-pastoral, and fundamentally antisocial: a work in
which both poet and reader become implicated, to unequal degrees, in a
trauma for which no adequate consolation exists, and which ultimately
alters the tenor of every elegy in its wake.
To examine how Owen manipulates epistemological distance to deny
elegiac consolation, we must move beyond the tendency of many critics to
divide his poems into an oversimplified thematic taxonomy. Perhaps
critics are inclined to read his poems this way because, as Desmond
Graham has noted, Owen himself used a rough classification system as he
thought about his projected collection, identifying a “motive” for each
of his poems. Taking a cue from Owen, critics like Jon Silkin have
divided his “crucial poems–those concerned with war” into distinct
thematic categories, which he claims “can be grouped under four
headings, without violating their complexity.” These are: 1) “poems in
which nature, if we exclude war, is the principal element”; 2)
“Sassoon-like poems protesting against the war”; 3) “poems whose
originating impulse is compassion or pity”; and 4) “poems which do not
fit any of the others.” Unfortunately, such classifications do violate
the poems’ complexity, since many poems include elements of all four
categories. Owen’s “motive” labels enabled him to undertake the mental
and emotional labor of a combatant-poet attempting to disentangle his
messy and ambivalent feelings about war–feelings that often seemed
inextricably welded to experiences tainted by a paradoxical impulse to
simultaneously remember and forget. For Silkin, these classifications
are tools through which “the poems may be helpfully explored.” We would
do better, I suggest, to view them as Owen did, lest we be guilty of the
oversimplification to which his poetry is so often subjected.
Owen’s sonnet “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” in particular, often
suffers from such readings. One of the best-known poems of his early
“mature” or “major” phase (the period of his greatest poetic production
coinciding with his convalescence from shell-shock at Craiglockart
Hospital in Scotland), it is also one of his most maligned works–a poem
that many critics (Jon Silkin, Geoffrey Hill, and Peter Dale being the
most vigorous) read as a declaration of the anti-consolatory ethic that
Owen announces in his preface, yet rife with self-contradiction. This
reading hinges on the last line of the sonnet’s octave, together with
its succeeding sestet, in both of which memory seems to function as a
means of achieving elegiac consolation. This interpretation requires
reading the sestet literally, in contrast to the octave’s ironic tone.
But if we read the entire poem as an ironic treatment of traditional
mourning rituals, and (as Graham cautions) resist the urge to “read Owen
slackly,” we can detect what I have suggested are the subtle and
crucial barriers that Owen erects between himself and his noncombatant
readers.
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,–
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmer of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
Reading the poem this way, as a reaction against the pastoral
elegy’s consolatory mourning, is to see it beginning in medias res with
the sort of impassioned question that often appears in the middle of
traditional pastoral elegiac performances: “What passing-bells for these
who die as cattle?” As Sandra Gilbert notes in Death’s Door,
this opening line effectively dismisses centuries of elegiac tradition,
“declaring the bankruptcy of both religion and genre as sources of
comfort.” But how precisely does it do so? Repeated questions are a
significant convention in the traditional elegy. Peter Sacks explains
their consolatory function as leading the mourner away from the object
of mourning to reunite with the larger community. But unlike the
questions found in traditional elegies, which the speaker often
addresses to various deities, Owen’s question assumes no addressee. Its
rhetorical nature restricts the movement of the question, along with its
anger, to a single vector: away from the bereaved mourner. To be sure,
the questions posed by traditional elegies to specific individuals often
remain unanswered, frequently prompting the elegist to multiply his
questions, whose “repetitive, incantatory nature,” as Sacks explains,
“emphasizes the possibly exorcistic or expiatory element of the ritual.”
In an interesting inversion, Owen’s elegy casts its incantatory
spell by multiplying answers rather than questions. The first question
takes up the first line, and Owen devotes the octave’s remaining seven
lines to answering it with a series of exclusionary repetitions: “Only”
in lines 2 and 3, “no” and “nor” in lines 5 and 6. This single question,
posed to no one, with its lengthy, negative response, precludes the
possibility of an answer from another speaker. Owen thus makes it clear
that he is the only one who can hope to answer such questions, however
unsatisfactory his answers may be. This truncation of the mourning
ritual, facilitated by the sonnet’s strict formal boundaries, allows
Owen to increase the distance between himself, a poet possessing
firsthand experience of war’s carnage, and the larger mourning
community, whose voices he pointedly excludes from the communal act of
mourning.
The exclusionary nature of Owen’s mourning becomes even more
apparent when we examine the revisions he made during the poem’s
composition. This sonnet underwent six complete drafts, and the changes
Owen made to the first two lines alone reveal the extent to which he
consciously manipulates the perceived distance between himself and his
readers. As John Stephens and Ruth Waterhouse point out in a 1987 essay
on Owen’s revisions, his original draft referred to the youth of the
title as “these” in line 1. In the second, third, and fourth drafts,
however, the third-person “these” becomes the second-person “you.” The
first line of these intermediate drafts reads, “What passing bells for you
who die in herds” (emphasis mine). The alteration betrays Owen’s
ambivalence toward his own elegizing and his struggle to distance
himself as a surviving poet from the object of loss.
More significantly, though, the change back to “these” in the final
draft reveals a return to the poem’s original mode of address; in other
words, the poem is no longer addressed to the dead and dying soldiers
but rather to a nameless spectator. In this sense, Owen’s use of “these”
in the first line functions in a manner both similar to and notably
differing from the “this” in a posthumous fragmentary poem by Keats that
has become, for the literary theorist Jonathan Culler, a touchstone for
how lyric poetry “baldly asserts what is false” yet nonetheless incites
us as readers to see it as “really present and perpetually held towards
us through the poem”:
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d–see here it is–
I hold it towards you.
Like Keats, who repeatedly makes use of this device to reinforce the
illusion that we can actually see the “living hand” (“here it is– / I
hold it towards you”), Owen seems to transport us to the site of
slaughter so that we might see for ourselves “these who die as
cattle.” But unlike Keats, who is heavily invested in his own illusion
and wants us, as Culler argues, to believe that we can actually see the
hand, Owen quickly dispels the poetic fantasy that we as readers can
displace the temporal and spatial boundaries preventing us from viewing
the trench lines in France or the bodies so often entombed in unmarked
graves. Instead, Owen makes us aware of the illusion by extending, in
the succeeding lines, the distance that the first line’s “these” so
neatly closes. We see this most clearly in the draft changes of line 2,
in which Owen’s phrasing oscillated between “our guns” in the first
draft and “the guns” in the final revision. This move, as Stephens and
Waterhouse note, “works in the opposite direction, to reduce the
immediacy at this point by dissociating speaker and reader from the
guns.” After pointing us toward “these who die as cattle,” Owen immediately pulls us back. Instead of gesturing toward these guns here or those guns there, he wants us to imagine a “monstrous anger” emanating from “the
guns.” Though it normally functions as a definite article, “the”
becomes indeterminate in this context, as the uninitiated spectator on
the front lines might appropriately ask, “Which guns?” Such
indeterminacy in identifying the precise agent of death is an
appropriate mimetic representation of dying in this particular war–the
first in which a vast number of combatants were killed by weapons they
could hear but not see.
In fact, the sounds that we perceive in the octave represent another
means by which Owen distances us as readers from the deaths his poem
laments. In the octave, the only human voices are that of the poet and
the “hasty orisons” of those waiting to die, both of which seem at times
to be overcome by the deafening, persistent sounds of the mechanically
induced and often impersonal deaths of modern war. The only sounds of
mourning derive from the weapons, which, in Owen’s hands, become
strangely personified implements that grieve for the very deaths they
cause. In this way, we might say, the weapons mimic the guilt Owen
associates with his own elegiac performance, both (as Ramazani has
suggested) in potentially profiting from those deaths as a published
poet, and also in mourning the soldiers for whose deaths he often felt
responsible. (A letter to Siegfried Sassoon dated 16 January 1917
indicates that Owen, like many combatant officers, suffered a classic
case of “survivor’s guilt,” indulging the sadomasochistic impulse to
believe that he caused deaths in circumstances over which he had no
control.)
But the weapon sounds also serve another psychic need, enabling Owen
to silence the civilian mourners, a group contaminated by guilt for
their ostensible collective indifference to the soldiers’ suffering.
Such gestures, which render civilian readers as dumb as those “who die
as cattle,” show with particular clarity the critical fallacy of
treating Owen’s “Sassoon-like” anger as a transitory phase in his poetic
trajectory, and a close examination of his work from June 1917 until
his death in 1918 reveals a persistent hostility toward civilians.
Whatever answer they might supply to Owen’s question, the “monstrous
anger of the guns” and “the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle” would drown
out the civilians’ distant voices, just as these weapons “patter out”
the more proximal prayers of the doomed and dying soldiers, thus denying
consolation to both mourner and victim.
Even Owen’s depiction of the weapons’ sounds constitutes a subtle
and sardonic means of distancing his civilian readers from this unusual
act of mourning. The characterization of the “stuttering rifles’ rapid
rattle” is a wonderfully realistic mimesis of the proper technique one
must use to effectively employ a machine gun. The falling rhythm of
“stutter-” leads into the extra stress (in this line of eleven
syllables) on the velar-nasal phoneme “-ing,” forcing the reader to
pause slightly before resuming the trochaic rhythm in “rifles’” and then
proceeding quickly into the more strongly stressed alliteration of
“rapid rattle.” The aural effect of this choppy line resembles the
technique machine gunners have been taught to use since the weapon’s
invention: a short, controlled burst of fire (to confirm proper sighting
and appropriate effects on the target), followed by a more rapid and
sustained burst (to suppress, neutralize, or destroy the target). As
soldiers learn early in their military training, if the duration of the
burst is too long, the barrel can overheat, thus rendering the weapon
inoperable. The momentary pauses allow the barrel to cool just long
enough to prevent the dangerous expansion of gas that could result in
the melting and distortion of the metal. Owen’s careful versification of
this line faithfully replicates the proper operation of the machine it
personifies–a feature of the poem that may remain obscured to a reader
untrained in the employment of a belt-fed, water-cooled, fully automatic
weapon.
If, as modern readers, we furthermore read the pun on “wailing
shells” as an obvious one (the shells wail for the dead as part of the
elegiac mourning party that Owen ironizes in this octave, but also make a
literal “wailing” sound as they descend toward their target) and take
it for granted that Owen’s “shrill, demented choirs” are the telltale
sounds of incoming bombs or artillery shells, this is largely as a
result of the ubiquitous black-and-white documentary footage of the
amphibious landing operations and incessant bombing campaigns of World
War II, with its largely accurate, though sometimes exaggerated
Foley-sound reproductions. But for Owen’s original audience, reading his
poems in this terrifying new age of industrialized warfare, the
distinct whistling or wailing sound of incoming projectiles was
relatively unknown, and would remain so to the majority of British
civilians until the German Blitz on London in 1939. (The Zeppelin
bombings of World War I were neither ubiquitous nor destructive enough
to familiarize the majority of British civilians with the sound.)
If the poem’s first seven lines work to obstruct “our” experience of
the mourning performance by denying the vision, eliminating the voice,
and confounding all perception of war’s destructive sounds, the octave’s
final line and the succeeding sestet seem, for many critics at least,
to signal a shift in the sonnet’s tone away from irony to the more
traditional consolatory function of elegy. Jon Silkin identifies Owen’s
move here as one of the “weaker elements” that contaminate his poetry: a
type of “saccharine pity” that he refers to as “the sad shires
syndrome.” According to Silkin and others, Owen’s apparent acceptance of
melancholic mourning as an adequate compensation for the war’s
senseless destruction threatens to undermine the anti-consolatory ethic
outlined in his preface. But if line 8 functions in its traditional role
as the volta ( turn) from octave to sestet, then Silkin’s reading makes
it less a subtle shift in tone than an outright course reversal, an
abrupt about-face from an ironic to an empathetic mode of mourning.
Ramazani, by contrast, perceives this discordant shift not as a weakness
in Owen’s poetry but rather as part of his conscious subversion of
elegiac practice. Like Silkin, Ramazani reads the sestet as consolatory
in tone but suggests that it represents a deliberate choice on Owen’s
part, in which he purposefully reverts to a “compensatory
economy”–precisely so as to demonstrate its deficiency.
Ramazani’s, to my mind at least, is the more convincing reading. But
we might, in fact, go farther and read the sestet as a continuation of
the octave’s ironic rejection of elegiac solace. Paradoxically, Owen’s
apparent capitulation to the redemptive claims of traditional mourning
practices further attenuates the already strained relationship between
combatant and civilian that we find in the octave. Like the octave’s
overtly ironic subversion of the pathetic fallacy and its conspicuous
exclusion of human voices, the sestet subtly ironizes the children’s
mourning rituals and their thwarted attempts to attain solace in the
absence of the material tokens of death. There are no “candles … to
speed them all” to eternal repose, nor are there flowers with which to
“strew the laureate hearse” as is the case for Milton’s beloved Lycidas.
Rather, the absence of these outward symbols of bereavement reflects
the peculiar nature of mortal loss and remembrance in this war, a
conflict in which so many corpses remained unrecovered and often
unburied.
The historian John Keegan estimates that at least half of the bodies
of those who died on the Western Front were irretrievable. Even bodies
that could be recovered (the ones not bloated and rotting in the middle
of No-Man’s Land) often weren’t. As Paul Fussell notes, “Dead horses and
dead men–and parts of both–were sometimes not buried for months and
often simply became an element of parapets and trench walls.” As bodies
faded into this ungenerative landscape, loved ones at home sought to
restore traditional mourning rituals by any and all means available, to
indemnify themselves from the social and psychological rupture of
thwarted burial rites. Seeking some degree of finality and closure, one
Anglican minister went so far as to suggest that an unidentified dead
soldier be disinterred and reburied in a memorial “place of honour,”
with the first such reburial occurring at Westminster Abbey on the
second anniversary of the Armistice. This tradition gained traction in
later years as both the French and the Americans created their own
mausoleums of unidentified, disinterred, and reburied bodies and
fragments. Such practices remind us how important it is to confront the
materiality of death; we want to see it–the body, the casket, the
gravestone–for ourselves. To do so is, on one level, to objectify the
person, divested of humanity, as a mere thing and in doing so to assert
our defiance of mortality by distancing ourselves from its outward
manifestations. The construction of these non-anthropomorphic memorials,
like the highly artificial tropes of Milton’s elegy for a body lost at
sea, mark an attempt to thwart death’s ultimate negation of materiality.
As the multinational popularity of these memorials demonstrates, a
substituted body in the form of a mausoleum or cenotaph is better than
no body at all because we simply cannot attain distance, or the
consolation it promises, from something that we cannot see, perceive, or
experience.
Or can we? In Owen’s poem, the mourning children’s pursuit of
consolation in the absence of death’s visible manifestations hinges on
their ability to attain this distance through an act of substitution.
Like the burials and reburials occurring in villages and capitals across
Europe, the mourners in the sestet procure their own memorial corpse
for burial, albeit nonmaterial, conjuring it through an imaginative act
of apotheosis. By eliminating the materiality of death in this poem,
Owen allows the mourners–both the children of the sestet and his
readers–to indulge a fantasy in which the dead soldiers become embodied
in memory. But these memories do more than merely objectify the “doomed
youth,” reifying the absent materiality of their deaths in “the holy
glimmers of goodbyes,” “the pallor of girls’ brows,” and “the tenderness
of patient minds.” In carrying out a memorial function infused with an
overabundance of sentimentality and pathos, the mourning children do not
merely turn dead soldiers into objects; rather, such mawkish
sentimentality turns them–as Elizabeth Samet suggests in her recent
article “Can an American Soldier Ever Die in Vain?”–into fetishized
objects. As such, they become commoditized symbols of loss and
sacrifice, devoid of any greater human context, that propagate that “old
Lie” of Horace and their fathers: “Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria
mori.” And while these memories may appear to be more intimate than the
material mourning rituals they replace, they ultimately position the
dead soldiers at a far greater remove from the civilian mourners than we
find in traditional funereal rites and elegiac practice. The
memorializing process suggests, in fact, that these soldiers became
objects long before their deaths. Dehumanized as “cattle” in death, they
were little more in life than mere symbols, idealized anthropomorphisms
of abstract and imprecise notions like duty, honor, sacrifice, and
gallantry as depicted in the reductive readings of English public school
boys. But this act of distancing–unlike the sort performed by the
mourners in conventional elegiac performance–is not a victimless crime.
The consolation that these mourners seek requires a sentimentality that
obfuscates reason, and without reason there can be no meaningful
examination of the true motives, costs, and outcomes of war.
Perhaps this is why Owen selected the sonnet, the most traditional
of English poetic forms, to ironize such traditional and increasingly
archaic modes of public grieving. As the critic Peter Howarth
convincingly argues, Owen’s decision to attach the strangely
inappropriate title “Anthem” to a fourteen-line poem indicates that he
wished to give “this public, elegiac role to the sonnet to emphasize its
littleness–and oddness–amid what should have been the huge cathedral
ceremonies of national grief.” The reverse is also true: Owen wished to
give this sonnet’s elegiac role to the public to emphasize the “littleness,” “oddness,” and absolute inadequacy of their
grief. Such mourning, like true pity or a nation’s collective memory,
is short-lived. In the poem’s final couplet, the apparently sincere,
well-intentioned mourners seek to prolong the compensatory claims of
their sentimental remembrance, replacing “their flowers” with “the
tenderness of patient minds.” But even as this penultimate line extends
beyond the pentameter’s constraining boundaries, naively hoping to
reverse the gradual recession of memory and its redemptive promise, the
poem concludes as it began: refusing to yield to the false sentiment and
artifice of generic convention. Owen’s mourners remain blind to the
paradoxical logic which insists that “peace would do wrong to our
undying dead,” just as they remain blind to the fact that the doomed
youth were un-living long before they were actually
dead–murdered by an objectification that places sentiment above reason.
And just as “each slow dusk” brings about “a drawing-down of blinds,” so
too does it hasten the recession of memory and any hope of consolation
it may portend.
If, like so many of Owen’s poems, “Anthem for Doomed Youth” is less
ambivalent in its tone than many critics have supposed, it is perhaps
worth thinking about why a poet whose work is so ostensibly accessible
would exclude the majority of his readers for their perceived failure to
apprehend the war’s realities. In one sense, of course, this is nothing
new; as James Campbell has noted in an essay on the concept he calls
“Combat Gnosticism” (1999), veterans of nearly every nation have long
claimed access to a privileged and ineffable knowledge of war that
remains hidden from those who have not experienced it directly. One need
not look far to find evidence of this belief in the letters, memoirs,
poems, and fiction written by veterans of World War I (and many wars
since). In 1969, more than forty years after publishing his memoir A Subaltern’s War
(1929), Charles Carrington composed what is perhaps the most direct
expression of this exceptionalism: “We are still an initiate generation,
possessing a secret that can never be communicated… . Twenty million of
us, of whom perhaps 2,000,000 are still alive, shared the experience
with one another but with no one else, and are what we are because, in
that war, we were soldiers.”
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to encounter this sentiment from a
veteran of such a destructive war, one that merged the nationalism of
the Napoleonic wars with the large-scale mechanization and production of
the Industrial Revolution to generate an unprecedented capacity for
killing. But how does this exceptionalism, which we find throughout the
literature and correspondence of World War I veterans, give way to the
exclusionary impulses of Owen’s non-consolatory elegies? How do we
account for poems that exclude the very audience for whom they were
presumably written? On one level, at least, this paradox is endemic to
any elegy. That is, the elegist must always, to some degree, mediate
between the genuine impulse to mourn a death and the guilt that inheres
in producing an imaginative work that profits from that death. In this
sense, the exclusion of Owen’s civilian readers is one way to mitigate
the guilt he probably felt about writing poems that, as Ramazani notes,
promised to gain from the loss of his fellow soldiers.
But some historians have suggested that the anger World War I
veterans felt toward civilians was a product of the unprecedented
conditions of that particular war. Citing a 1923 psychological study of
trench warfare by W. M. Maxwell, Eric Leed, in his No Man’s Land,
notes that “it was the frustration of aggression in war, due to the
disappearance of the enemy and the necessities of entrenchment, which …,
forced the combatant to turn his hostilities against ‘improper’
targets: officers, the staff, or the ‘home.’” This explanation is
suggestive on a number of levels. Like the elegist who engages in an act
of imaginative displacement, replacing the dead with an object of
mourning to thwart the onset of melancholia, so, too, must the combatant
direct his anger toward a proxy in the absence of an enemy that he can
see. The targets of the displaced anger that Leed identifies share one
common characteristic: with the exception of some of the officers, they
all were physically removed, in varying degrees, from the fiercest
fighting on the forward-most lines. This lack of proximity precluded
them from sharing in the privileged knowledge of combat, and the anger
that combatants felt toward them was often directly proportional to
their distance from the front and the concomitant failure of knowledge
that accompanied such distance.
Owen’s rejection of his civilian readers in “Anthem for Doomed
Youth” and his expression of anger toward civilians elsewhere in his
work was not a new sentiment in 1917, and echoes of it certainly remain
in the minds of many who wage our current wars. More than 80 percent of
the post-9/11 veterans surveyed in a recent Pew Research poll reported
feeling disconnected from the broader public. It would be easy to
attribute this alienation, and the resentment that sometimes results
from it, to the unlikely similarities between the post-9/11 wars and
World War I–namely, the absence of a persistently visible enemy and the
temporal “entrenchment” inherent in seventeen years of continuous
conflict–but to do so would be to ignore the more central and
problematic issue. Like Owen’s anger toward, and exclusion of, his
civilian readers, the ambivalence that emerges from our current
generation of veterans seems, in many cases, to originate from the
central paradox of “combat gnosticism”: that civilians do not have a
knowledge which they cannot possess. Tautologies aside, this belief is
problematic not only because it fetishizes trauma but also because it
presumes a failure of imagination. As a veteran and recovering combat
gnostic, I continue to subscribe to the belief that there are many
aspects of combat (a word that is, as Paul Fussell notes, itself a kind
of euphemism) that cannot be replicated beyond the narrow boundaries of
this somewhat singular experience. But those boundaries do not–indeed,
must not–obviate the function of imagination on both sides of the
divide. It may just be the case that poetry, as a more than mimetic
vehicle of imagination, can offer us the best hope of adequately
representing the ineffable qualities of war.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do
not reflect the official policy or position of the United States
Military Academy, Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the
U.S. Government.
