Hence in the poem ‘Smile, Smile, Smile’, Owen presents his own wounded men, “half-limbed readers” scanning those same papers in which “broad smiles appear each week”. Driven by an ambition to set the record straight, he set out to undermine the effect of the pictures on public opinion with his own portrait of returning soldiers, those he defined as “the sunk-eyed wounded”. Towards the end of the war, photographs in the newspapers of smiling wounded men exacerbated his anger. Having quickly established that the truth of war was far removed from what was to be believed on the Home Front, Owen’s intolerance of the discrepancy between the soldiers’ truth and the truth conveyed by pro-war propaganda was to grow stronger as his experience of war deepened. In one of his earliest letters to his mother from the Front, he wrote: “ Those ‘Somme Pictures’ are the laughing stock of the army – like the trenches on exhibition in Kensington” (Hibberd 1973, 63). The discrepancy between what the poet discovered on arriving in France in January 1917 and what he knew was being circulated in newspapers, films and exhibitions back home was intolerable. Owen himself declared “I think every poem, and every figure of speech should be a matter of experience ” (Stallworthy 1974, 240).ģ Owen’s creative impulse was all the stronger as within weeks of arriving in northern France, the poet had become aware that the reality of war stood in stark contrast to the ideas being spread about by the propagandists on the Home Front. Over a year before he wrote of hypothermic soldiers in ‘Exposure’, Owen had written home about being “marooned on a frozen desert” and about frost-bitten casualties, marvelling at the fact that “only one of party actually froze to death” (Hibberd 1973, 64). The poem ‘The Sentry’ recounts a tragedy Owen had witnessed at close-hand in January 1917. Not surprisingly, there is often a correlation between events recounted by Owen in his correspondence and those which provide subject-matter for the poems. There is one title I prize, one clear call audible, one Sphere where I may influence for Truth, one workshop where I may send forth Beauty, one mode of living entirely congenial to me.”(Hibberd 1973, 53). This time to his mother, he wrote in March 1915: “A boy, I guessed that the fullest, largest liveable life was that of a Poet. Another letter written before he had experienced war shows that it was precisely a Keatsian ambition to convey beauty and truth that made Owen aspire to be a poet. It is in fact difficult to dissociate Owen’s desire to convey truth and his desire to be a poet. The letter included diagrams of injuries and the justification: “I deliberately tell you all this to educate you to the actualities of the war” (Stallworthy 1974, 110). In September 1914, it was clearly with a didactic aim that he wrote to his brother of the macabre goings-on there. Prior to enlisting, Owen had observed surgical operations in a military hospital near Bordeaux. It can be traced in his earliest correspondence. The desire to report back to those whose understanding of events depended on him was to shape Owen’s life. Acutely aware that he was making public a truth that belonged to a generation, Owen was tormented by an inner conflict which can be traced in his poems.Ģ Owen was driven as a soldier and as a poet by a deep desire to bear witness to the tragic events unfolding on the Front. Recording the reality of the front as he himself had experienced it, while remaining loyal to the men with whom he had shared it, Owen defines the inner conflict his poetic enterprise engendered in a letter to his mother, asking “And am I not myself a conscientious objector with a very seared conscience?” (Letter to Susan Owen. Owen’s most widely studied war poems, written between the spring of 1917 and October 1918, show that the poet was committed to re-creating the battlefield for those who would never experience it. He was shot as he was helping his men to cross the Sambre Canal. (Hibberd 1973, 86)ġ Wilfred Owen, one of the best-known poets of the First World War, was killed in northern France on 4 th Nov 1918 just one week before the Armistice. And to describe it, I think I must go back and be with them. It will never be painted, and no actor will ever seize it. It was not despair, or terror, for it was a blindfold look, and without expression, like a dead rabbit’s. But chiefly I thought of the very strange look on all faces in that camp an incomprehensible look, which a man will never see in England, though wars should be in England nor can it be seen in any battle.
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