Neither experience, no matter how terrible or elevating it may be, nor emotion, no matter how deeply felt, are poetry. Poetry is an art, and raw experience and raw emotion must be refined by art before they become poetry.
The First World War was, for those who experienced it in the trenches, an almost unspeakable hell. Whole libraries have been written, from many points of view, to try to explain what it was like for those who had to endure it. Even so, it is something we cannot know who were not there. But some of the poets were able to transform the experience and emotion into statements that give us something of the truth. But, as we shall see, not all the poems written about the war are equally valuable.
When the First World War began in 1914, the poet who seemed most quickly to catch the mood of the moment was Rupert Brooke. Even before he was killed in 1915 he had become almost a legend: the young, handsome Renaissance man whose poetry, it seemed to many people at the time, had an Elizabethan vigor.
Yet Brooke's poetry is unsatisfactory: it tries to be profound, but never manages to catch more than a surface romanticism, a concern with words which in the end are no more than vague emotional counters. The great critic F.R. Leavis has summed Brooke up this way: “He energized the Garden Suburb ethos with a certain original talent and the vigour of a prolonged adolescence.”
Brooke's attitude to the war was naturally romantic: it would have been odd for it to have been anything else at that time, when in all the capitals of Europe enthusiasm for the war was at a peak. But soon-certainly by 1916 it was impossible to think of the war as a glorious crusade. The trench warfare and the battles dragged on, and poets like Siegfried Sassoon began to express in their poetry more realistically the waste and the horror of war.
It is Wilfred Owen, however, who has come to be seen as the finest poet of the war period, though it took some time after his death in 1918 and the publication of his poems in 1920 for his importance to be widely recognized. Up to about 1916 he was a fairly conventional poet, imitative of two poets of the nineteenth century, Keats and Tennyson. The experience of the grim and disordered life of an infantry officer in the trenches gave him an entirely fresh experience to work on. In a letter written in 1917 he remarked: “Tennyson, it seems, was always a great child. So should I have been, but for Beaumont Hamel. Not before January 1917 did I write the only lines of mine that carry the stamp of maturity.”
Beaumont Hamel was a part of the front line where there had been particularly heavy fighting. During the last two years of his life-and it was in that short time he wrote the poems that have established his reputation-he combined the great sensitiveness he had always had with a depth that came from having to confront harsh reality:
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
(from “Dulce et Decorum Est”)
Owen pulls no punches in his poetry-it is fierce and angry. His purpose was stated quite clearly in the Preface he prepared when gathering his poems together to publish as a book: “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. All a poet can do today is warn.”
One aspect of Owen's work that marks him out from the other war poets is his sense of form. This is adventurous; and in his best work the sense of urgency with which he writes seems to force out lines and expressions that almost dictate their own form. Look, for instance, at “Insensibility”, where the loose line structure and the variable stresses echo the mingled doubt and certainty of what is being said:
Happy are men who yet before they are killed
Can let their veins run cold.
Whom no compassion fleers
Or makes their feet
Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers.
And later:
Having seen all things red
Their eyes are rid
Of the hurt of the colour of blood for ever.
Here the two short lines with their monosyllabic half-rhymes, “red” and “rid”, stab home quickly before the long line, the disillusionment and weariness of which is stressed by its very length and by the repeated “of…of…of”, throwing the stress onto “hurt…colour…blood” and dying away in the unstressed “for ever”.
