tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/wilfred-owen-7857/articles
Wilfred Owen – The Conversation
2023-12-27T09:10:47Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/220251
2023-12-27T09:10:47Z
2023-12-27T09:10:47Z
Seamus Heaney: ten years after his death, the generosity and warmth of his rich poetic voice endures
<p>The English war poet Wilfred Owen once wrote, “Celebrity is the last infirmity I desire.” Killed in France at the age of 25, unpublished and unknown, “celebrity” for Owen was a posthumous phenomenon. By contrast, celebrity status for the Irish poet <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/seamus-heaney">Seamus Heaney</a> – “Famous Seamus” – came early in his life.</p>
<p>The eldest of nine children raised on a small farm called Mossbawn in County Derry – which was so crucial to his imaginative development – his first collection, <a href="https://www.waterstones.com/book/death-of-a-naturalist/seamus-heaney/9780571230839">Death of a Naturalist</a>, was accepted for publication by Faber when he was just 26.</p>
<p>Thirty years later, he became the fourth Irishman to <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1995/summary/">win the Nobel Prize for Literature</a>, following <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1925/shaw/facts/">Shaw</a>, <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1923/yeats/biographical/">Yeats</a> and <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1969/summary/">Beckett</a>. By the time of his death in 2013, Heaney’s books accounted for some <a href="https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poet/seamus-heaney/">two-thirds of the sales</a> of contemporary poets in the UK.</p>
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<p>Always conscious of Owen’s example, as well as Yeats, Frost or the Romantic poets, Heaney shares with them all the unusual capacity to reach a much larger audience than poetry generally enjoys.</p>
<p>Readers <a href="https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/i-grieved-for-my-husband-not-seamus-heaney-the-poet-says-widow-marie/35043954.html">felt his death in 2013 as a personal loss</a>, bereft as they were of a familiar and intimate voice that had accompanied them through half a century’s life of writing, with Heaney’s own story woven into the turbulent story of Ireland.</p>
<h2>A life in letters</h2>
<p>The recently published edition of <a href="https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-letters-of-seamus-heaney/seamus-heaney/9780571341085#:%7E:text=Spanning%20his%20early%20days%20in,from%20a%20titan%20of%20poetry.">Heaney’s letters</a>, edited by poet Christopher Reid, is a marvellous addition for an audience always hungry for more Heaney.</p>
<p>Beginning with his “new life” in 1965 – marriage, house-buying in Belfast, manuscript acceptance – it bears witness to what Reid calls “the sheer outward-facing busyness” of Heaney’s life. It was a busyness that brought, alongside celebrity, increasingly obvious pressures on a poet always generous with himself, his time and his work.</p>
<p>It’s unsurprising that as his fame grew, so too did the demands made on him. And as writer Bel Mooney <a href="https://www.mailplus.co.uk/edition/books/329937">noted recently</a>, although “all of us who wanted a piece of him could have been fobbed off”, he was “just too nice”. The letters – abundant and revelatory, evidencing, as Reid puts it, Heaney’s “delight in his own fertile rhetoric” – are a treasure trove of delights for the reader.</p>
<p>But they prove Owen’s point about the challenges of celebrity, too: “Excuse the stationery … this jotter is to hand”; “Please forgive me for not being in touch”; “Please excuse the pencil, I’m on the plane …”; “You deserved to hear from me before this”; “Hurriedly, with love – Seamus”.</p>
<p>The generosity and warmth of the poet as a public figure is, of course, one of the reasons why he was and is beloved by many – not least those who, in huge numbers, encountered him in person through a lifetime of lectures, readings, workshops and launches. He once joked that one day his unsigned books would be more valuable.</p>
<h2>Faith in poetry</h2>
<p>That warmth and generosity came at a cost to Heaney personally, as he struggled to protect from public scrutiny those “whole areas of one’s life that one wants to keep free from the gaze of print”. He wanted to shield as well those elements of his “remembered soul landscape” that were the source of his inspiration – what Wordsworth termed “the hiding-places of my power”.</p>
<p>Protect them he did since it is, in the end, the imaginative generosity of the poems themselves, not the personal generosity of the man, that ensures his legacy. It does so in part because of Heaney’s faith in the poem – as answering to no agenda other than its own being, operating as its own “vindicating force”, undiminished by, and existing outside of, the noise and “busyness” of life.</p>
<p>In his <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1995/heaney/lecture/">1995 Nobel lecture</a>, Heaney spoke of poetry’s “gift for telling truth” – and beyond that, its capacity “to be not only pleasurably right, but compellingly wise”. It might even be “a retuning of the world itself”.</p>
<p>Few contemporary poets have devoted so much time to writing a defence of poetry as Heaney; fewer still have done so in terms so protective of poetry’s autonomy. Irish poet Leontia Flynn <a href="http://leontiaflynn.com/irish-university-review-radically-necessary-heaney/">writes</a> of finding herself “nearly as grateful for his defence of poetry as … for his poems”. </p>
<p>Heaney’s capacity to “credit marvels” in the world around him is, quite literally, the gift that keeps on giving. As he writes in his poem <a href="https://www.poetryireland.ie/publications/poetry-ireland-review/online-archive/view/fosterling">Fosterling</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Me waiting until I was nearly fifty</p>
<p>To credit marvels. Like the tree-clock of tin cans</p>
<p>The tinkers made. So long for air to brighten,</p>
<p>Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In one of his finest lyrics, <a href="https://genius.com/Seamus-heaney-the-harvest-bow-annotated">The Harvest Bow</a>, the “throwaway love-knot of straw” plaited by his father is echoed in the intricate weaving, “twist by twist”, of its harvest bow of words.</p>
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<p>Its “golden loops” are a gateway to the past, and as we follow Heaney’s “homesick” memory of walking peaceably with his father, the beautifully crafted love-knot encircles and cradles an entire community and a way of life. The bow is a still a “frail device”. Like poetry, it is both transformative and under threat; but most importantly, it endures.</p>
<p>A decade after his death, Heaney’s voice, like the harvest bow, is “burnished by its passage, and still warm”.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Fran Brearton does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The great Irish poet left a legacy of astonishing poems that speak to new readers with their deep wisdom and quietly devastating imagery.
Fran Brearton, Professor of Modern Poetry, School of Arts, English and Languages, Queen's University Belfast
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/105587
2018-11-08T18:05:29Z
2018-11-08T18:05:29Z
A glimmer of light amidst the darkness: honour in the First World War
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243907/original/file-20181105-83641-k751ei.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=1%2C11%2C797%2C543&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A display of acrobatics by German internees at the prisoner of war camp at Newbury Racecourse in Berkshire in October 1914.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/German_Prisoners_of_War_in_Britain_during_the_First_World_War_Q53357.jpg">Imperial War Museum/Wikimedia</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The first lines of Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57258/insensibility">Insensibility</a>’ (1893 – 1918) bear testament to the chilling impact of the First World War on those who participated in it:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Happy are men who yet before they are killed<br>
Can let their veins run cold.<br>
Whom no compassion fleers<br>
Or makes their feet<br>
Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The sacrifice of more than 16 million lives on the altar of an unfeeling war machine and the traumatisation of millions more, which Owen, writer <a href="https://www.cairn.info/revue-d-histoire-moderne-et-contemporaine-2001-4-page-160.htm">Jean Norton Cru</a> and other like-minded eyewitnesses so evocatively captured, have become the point of reference for the modern remembrance of 1914-18. It is easy enough to understand why the horrors of the trenches, the introduction of ever more efficient methods of killing and atrocities like the Armenian genocide have left such an indelible impression on the collective imagination.</p>
<p>And yet societies’ adaptation to what the Dublin historian John Horne has termed the <a href="https://zeithistorische-forschungen.de/3-2004/id%3D4534">“totalitarian tendencies”</a> of the Great War cannot be reduced to the corrosive effects of trauma alone. Rather than rendering combatants “insensible”, as Owen believed, the long duration of the war actually owed a great deal to citizens’ emotional mobilisation for higher ideals. While the choice of belligerent nations to frame their struggle in terms of a <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Great_War_and_Medieval_Memory.html?id=pgY_V8I9WyIC&redir_esc=y">“last crusade”</a> might be dismissed as a propagandistic tool to shame the enemy, the rhetoric of chivalry counteracted the inhumanity of the conflict in sometimes surprising ways.</p>
<h2>Captivity and honour</h2>
<p>Consider the 8 million soldiers who ended up in captivity during the course of the war. The capture of so many troops presented armies with serious challenges. <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0968344507083992?journalCode=wiha">Protocols of surrender</a> were ill-defined and facilities for housing the men limited. Although prisoners consequently experienced <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/violence-against-prisoners-of-war-in-the-first-world-war/4DECCAF83694C8DE3B47CA6920BD97DC">abuse on a massive scale</a>, the hopes of one German pre-war legal scholar, Paul Wünnenberg, that captives should regain their freedom as long as they gave their word of honour to henceforth accept only non-combat duties were realised in a selective fashion.</p>
<p>For instance, in September 1914 the French war ministry issued <a href="https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006028796">special instructions</a> that allowed captured officers to keep their sword and to rent comfortable private accommodations in picturesque towns, where they could walk about if they consented in writing to abstain from escape attempts.</p>
<p>Avoiding the cost and inconvenience of having to employ guards, the British and German authorities early in the war likewise opted to release captured civilians and merchant crews once they had promised not to serve against the captor state. In at least <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/einestages/britischer-kriegsgefangener-robert-campbell-hafturlaub-vom-kaiser-hoechstpersoenlich-a-951254.html">one case</a>, a British officer even gained temporary release from captivity to visit his dying mother after pledging his personal honour to return, which he did.</p>
<p>To be sure, even though international humanitarian law in the shape of the <a href="https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/ihl/INTRO/150?OpenDocument">Hague Conventions</a> (1899/1907) endorsed parole agreements, belligerents largely abandoned the custom in the first year of the war. In itself this development was perhaps not surprising, for parole agreements imposed a moral obligation on prisoners to eschew escape, which deprived governments of their service. Furthermore, the option to enter into contracts with the enemy injected a democratic element into warfare by empowering the individual soldier to decide for himself when to quit the fight.</p>
<h2>Parole agreements</h2>
<p>More remarkable was the return of parole agreements in modified form during the second half of the Great War. The proliferation of “barbed wire disease” among long-term prisoners led to a series of bilateral treaties between Britain, France and Germany that provided for the internment of sick captives in neutral Switzerland as well as the Netherlands. These agreements entitled internees to visit local towns in return for their word of honour not to escape. The option to take short walks outside the camp walls also became available to officers who remained behind in Germany and agreed to sign so-called parole cards.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243920/original/file-20181105-12015-2nyeh5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243920/original/file-20181105-12015-2nyeh5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243920/original/file-20181105-12015-2nyeh5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243920/original/file-20181105-12015-2nyeh5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243920/original/file-20181105-12015-2nyeh5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243920/original/file-20181105-12015-2nyeh5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243920/original/file-20181105-12015-2nyeh5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Parole card, 1918.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Council of the National Army Museum</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The resurrection of parole as part of wider endeavours to improve captivity remind us that the cataclysm of the First World War was more than just a race to the bottom. Though too uncoordinated in the final resort to stem the systemic violence unleashed by the conflict’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/books/review/Sebag-Montefiore-t.html">“dynamic of destruction”</a>, these philanthropic impulses held important lessons for the subsequent course of humanitarian thought and practice (as evidenced, for instance, by the new <a href="https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/ihl/INTRO/305">Geneva Convention of 1929</a>).</p>
<p>The “sentiment d’honneur” was integral to this learning process because it constituted the primary guarantee for soldiers’ good conduct, as the Belgian international lawyer Gustave Rolin-Jacquemyns <a href="https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01856134/document">had pointed out</a> as early as 1871. Many years later a German peer commented on the <a href="https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k61390625/f161.image.r=Du%20manque%20de%20parole%20des%20prisonniers%20de%20guerreHenri%20HarburgerDu%20manque%20de%20parole%20des%20prisonniers%20de%20guerre">reciprocal nature of honour</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Even in war and between hostile armies, there needs to exist something like loyalty and good faith. In the absence of this principle no pause, cease-fire or capitulation are possible.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As the centenary of Armistice Day approaches, we would do well to commemorate this lesson.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/105587/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jasper Heinzen received funding from EURIAS, Institut d'études avancées de Paris and British Academy.</span></em></p>
During First World War, the rhetoric of chivalry counteracted the inhumanity of the conflict in sometimes surprising ways.
Jasper Heinzen, Maitre de conferences en histoire de l'Europe moderne, Université de York, Fellow 2018 - IEA de Paris, Institut d'études avancées de Paris (IEA) – RFIEA
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/106498
2018-11-07T15:49:29Z
2018-11-07T15:49:29Z
Anthill 31: World War I remembered – podcast
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244311/original/file-20181107-74787-avhemd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">shutterstock</span> </figcaption></figure><p>It was supposed to be the war to end all wars, and the sheer destructiveness of World War I was unprecedented for its time. More than 30 countries were involved, 65m men volunteered or were conscripted to fight and millions of civilians contributed to the war effort. Around 16m people died. And many of those who survived came home from the war psychologically and physically scarred for life. </p>
<p>This year marks the centenary of the end of the conflict and this episode of The Anthill podcast is focused on stories from the Great War, and the way it is being remembered 100 years later. </p>
<p>First, our host Annabel Bligh talks to Sean Lang, senior lecturer in history at Anglia Ruskin University, about how the Armistice came about at 11am on November 11, 1918 – and why it wasn’t actually the end of the fighting. </p>
<p>Next, we travel up to Scotland to hear from Neil McLennan, senior lecturer in education at the University of Aberdeen, about how he <a href="https://theconversation.com/owen-sassoon-and-graves-how-a-golf-club-in-scotland-became-the-crucible-for-the-greatest-war-poetry-80229">came across the letter which proved</a> that three of the great World War I poets – Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sasson and Robert Graves – actually met at a golf club near the Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh. McLennan and Paul Ferguson, associate professor of audio engineering at Edinburgh Napier University, also explain the genesis of a special concert they are organising to mark the centenary of the Armistice – involving musicians from all over the world.</p>
<p>And finally we hear what life was like for the men who refused to fight during the conflict. Lois Bibbings, professor of law, gender and history at the University of Bristol, explains how the clause which allowed men to object on the grounds of conscience was introduced when conscription began in Britain in 1916. Aled Eirug, senior lecturer at the school of management at Swansea University, whose grandfather was a conscientious objector in World War I, explains what life was like for some of the men who chose to go to work camps set up by the Home Office. And we hear from Ingrid Sharp, professor of German cultural and gender history at the University of Leeds, on the few men who refused to join the military in Germany, and how <a href="https://theconversation.com/life-was-even-tougher-for-the-german-conscientious-objectors-of-world-war-i-26715">life was even tougher for them</a>.</p>
<p>We’re always keen to hear what our listeners think about The Anthill. So we’ve created a short survey to gather your feedback and help us plan future podcasts at The Conversation. You can <a href="https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/NFYDXJK">find the survey here</a>. And you can always email us at podcast@theconversation.com too – we’d love to hear from you. </p>
<hr>
<p><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-anthill/id1114423002?mt=2"><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233721/original/file-20180827-75984-1gfuvlr.png" alt="Listen on Apple Podcasts" width="268" height="68"></a> <a href="https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly90aGVjb252ZXJzYXRpb24uY29tL3VrL3BvZGNhc3RzL3RoZS1hbnRoaWxsLnJzcw%3D%3D"><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233720/original/file-20180827-75978-3mdxcf.png" alt="" width="268" height="68"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-conversation/the-anthill"><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233716/original/file-20180827-75981-pdp50i.png" alt="Stitcher" width="300" height="88"></a> <a href="https://tunein.com/podcasts/Technology-Podcasts/The-Anthill-p877873/"><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233723/original/file-20180827-75984-f0y2gb.png" alt="Listen on TuneIn" width="318" height="125"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://radiopublic.com/the-anthill-GOJ1vz"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-152" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233717/original/file-20180827-75990-86y5tg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=268&fit=clip" alt="Listen on RadioPublic" width="268" height="87"></a> <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/265Bnp4BgwaEmFv2QciIOC?si=-WMr1ecDTsO_6avrkxZu8g"><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/237984/original/file-20180925-149976-1ks72uy.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=268&fit=clip" width="268" height="82"></a> </p>
<hr>
<p><strong><em>Credits:</em></strong></p>
<p><em>Thank you to City, University of London’s Department of Journalism for letting us use their studios to record The Anthill.</em> </p>
<p><em>Picture source: <a href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/flowers-red-poppies-blossom-on-wild-652631032">Shutterstock, A_Lesik</a></em></p>
<p><em>YouTube: British Army, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDS3TxtGaQ0">The Last Post for Remembrance</a></em> </p>
<p><em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB4cdRgIcB8&t=14s">Channel 4 Dulce Et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen: Read by Christopher Eccleston</a></em></p>
<p><em>Church bells by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T36p5Z8tWcg">Hereford District</a>.</em></p>
<p><em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpKmLcxvxVs&t=31s">The Lads of Quintinshill, 1915</a> by Thoren Ferguson</em></p>
<p><em>Armistice by Thoren Ferguson, courtesy of Neil McLennan and Paul Ferguson.</em></p>
<p><em>Free Music Archive: David Hilowitz, <a href="http://freemusicarchive.org/music/David_Hilowitz/Time_Passing_I/David_Hilowitz_-_Film_Cue_103_-_Time_Passing_I">Time Passing I</a></em> </p>
<p><em>The Anthill theme music is by Alex Grey for Melody Loops</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/106498/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
A podcast on World War I – from a meeting between the three great war poets, to what happened to conscientious objectors in both Britain and Germany.
Annabel Bligh, Business & Economy Editor and Podcast Producer, The Conversation UK
Gemma Ware, Head of Audio
Jane Wright, Commissioning Editor, Arts & Culture, The Conversation UK
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/106014
2018-11-04T10:32:00Z
2018-11-04T10:32:00Z
Wilfred Owen 100 years on: poet gave voice to a generation of doomed youth
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243778/original/file-20181104-83641-1klrd4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C14%2C1370%2C1281&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Wilfred Owen was killed in action on November 4, 1918.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Frontispiece from Poems of Wilfred Owen (1920)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>For many people, most of what they know about the futility, sacrifice and tragedy of World War I, they learned through reading the poetry of Wilfred Owen. But what they may not be aware of is how close the Armistice was when Owen was killed at the age of 25.</p>
<p>On November 4 1918, the 2nd Manchester Regiment received orders to cross the Sambre and Oise Canal near the village of Ors to capture German positions at the opposite side. But as the troops attempted to build a pontoon bridge, they came under heavy machine gun fire. Against the odds, they forced a crossing and routed the enemy, but in so doing they suffered more than 200 casualties. </p>
<p>The attack was one of multiple attempts made up and down the canal to push back the Germans, all with similar consequences. But what made the crossing at Ors different however was the death of its most celebrated officer – <a href="https://www.thegazette.co.uk/all-notices/content/344">Lieutenant Wilfred Owen</a> – who was hit while helping the men who were building the bridge.</p>
<p>The tragedy of Owen’s end, just seven days before the guns fell silent, stands out in the cultural memory ahead of the thousands of men who died – or were yet to die – during the final moments of World War I. As a poet, Owen understood the irony of heroism very well. He resisted giving concrete identities to the soldiers who populate his poems to stop their experiences from becoming mere anecdotes. One man’s suffering is not more tragic than that of another. </p>
<p>In a provisional preface, written for a collection of his verse he would never see published, he set down his belief in what poetry could do – or could not do – to appropriately remember the atrocity of war:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War.<br>
Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.<br>
My subject is War, and the pity of War.<br>
The Poetry is in the pity.<br>
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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The sentiment here echoes a shift in war poetry, away from the jingoistic tenor of <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/rupert-brooke">Rupert Brooke</a>’s sonnets from 1914 about “some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England” and the men that gave their life for “immortality” to <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/siegfried-sassoon">Siegfried Sassoon</a>’s defiant denunciations of the evils of war. </p>
<p>The “big” words “War” and “Poetry” were ultimately not important for Owen – the more humane invocation of “pity” was poignantly written in lowercase. What the country needed, what the world needed, was empathy and regret, not hero worship – there was nothing glorious in being dead. But the time for this was not now. He disbelieved whether his own generation would ever be able to deal truthfully with the trauma. He was probably correct.</p>
<h2>Early promise</h2>
<p>Owen had aspired to become a poet since boyhood. His early lyric verse written before the war showed promise, but it didn’t set him apart. The effects of war, and of his reading Sassoon, would change all that. Traditional lyricism gave way to starker rhythms, direct imagery and extensive use of assonance and half rhyme, which at once created sonic cohesion within a broken, phantasmagoric world. The protagonists in Owen’s poems are often no more than a spectre of themselves, mere voices who have lost all sense of their surroundings –- “unremembering” souls “[o]n dithering feet” who have “cease[d] feeling | Even themselves or for themselves”.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243717/original/file-20181102-12015-1i5o38g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243717/original/file-20181102-12015-1i5o38g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243717/original/file-20181102-12015-1i5o38g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243717/original/file-20181102-12015-1i5o38g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243717/original/file-20181102-12015-1i5o38g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243717/original/file-20181102-12015-1i5o38g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243717/original/file-20181102-12015-1i5o38g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Wilfred Owen’s grave at Ors Cemetery in France.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Hektor via Wikimedia Commons</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>These poetic phantoms, spectres, ghosts were not shaped by the fighting alone; more than the trenches, it was Owen’s experiences at the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/z9g7fg8">Craiglockhart War Hospital for Officers</a>, near Edinburgh, that coloured his vision. The four months spent there convalescing from shell shock would prove highly significant. Not only did he meet Sassoon there, who encouraged his poetic sensibilities, it was conducive to his creativity. </p>
<p>As part of their treatment, patients were subjected to <a href="http://ww1lit.nsms.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/exhibits/show/neilmclennan-vb3n19/16">ergotherapy</a>, a behavioural therapy developed by Dr Arthur Brock, who believed that through useful work and activity patients would regain healthy links with the world around them. Owen was put in charge of The Hydra, the hospital’s literary magazine, and encouraged to write poetry. But his surroundings also furnished Owen with something more valuable: a space to process the suffering he had seen and was seeing around him. This emotion, recollected in tranquillity, is crystallised in the subject matter of some of his best known poems – characterised by an evocation of the sick, the wounded and the dying. </p>
<p>His manuscripts reflect that state of mind. Composition for Owen was neither frenzied nor easy, but rather it involved a steady process of probing words and phrases from which he manufactured the emotional intensity in his poetry. Differences in pen and ink show how Owen revisited his drafts and touched them up at different moments in time, at Craiglockhart and also afterwards when awaiting medical clearance at Scarborough Barracks.</p>
<p>In May 1918, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/20/chasing-lost-time-life-ck-scott-moncrieff-soldier-spy-translator-jean-findlay-review">C K Scott-Moncrief</a>, who had tried and failed to secure Owen a Home posting as cadet instructor, told the young poet he ought to send his work to the publisher Heinemann. Owen was enthused by the encouragement. He drafted his Preface and hastily drew up a table of contents.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243769/original/file-20181104-83629-1hmchka.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243769/original/file-20181104-83629-1hmchka.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243769/original/file-20181104-83629-1hmchka.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243769/original/file-20181104-83629-1hmchka.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243769/original/file-20181104-83629-1hmchka.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1134&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243769/original/file-20181104-83629-1hmchka.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1134&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243769/original/file-20181104-83629-1hmchka.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1134&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Strange Meeting by Wilfred Owen.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">This item is from The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, University of Oxford (www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit); © University of Oxford</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But it is likely that getting his work in order led to more writing and rewriting. Two poems, <a href="http://ww1lit.nsms.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collections/item/3311">Hospital Barge</a> and <a href="http://ww1lit.nsms.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collections/item/3308">Futility</a> (one revised, the other new), appeared in The Nation a month later – in August he received his embarkation orders to return to France. On September 17, at 7.35am, he boarded a military train to Folkestone from where he crossed the English Channel. With the exception of just five poems published in magazines, he never prepared any of his poems for the press, leaving the bulk of his work in various stages of completion.</p>
<h2>Reluctant posthumous hero</h2>
<p>In 1920, his friend Sassoon published a slim volume from the surviving manuscripts with Chatto & Windus, soon followed by a reprint in 1921, which indicates reasonable sales. (A more complete edition appeared in 1931.) The critical response, however, was mixed. Writing in The Athenaeum, John Middleton Murray praised Owen for achieving “the most magnificent expression of the emotional significance of the War”. </p>
<p>The hidebound <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/profile/basil-de-s-lincourt">Basil de Selincourt</a>, on the other hand, dismissed Owen’s “soothing bitterness” in the Times Literary Supplement. He countered that “[t]he only glory imperishably associated with war is that of the supreme sacrifice which it entails; the trumpets and the banners are poor humanity’s imperfect tribute to that sublime implication”.</p>
<p>Owen’s posthumous reputation, however, owes much to the way that first volume introduced his work to the public. “All that was strongest in Wilfred Owen survives in his poems”, Sassoon wrote in his introduction. Unwittingly, perhaps, that phrase – and the frontispiece of Owen in his regimental uniform – entailed an act of monumentalisation that went against Owen’s preface that his book was “not about heroes”. </p>
<p>Owen’s legacy is inscribed into a culture of remembrance (that persists to this day) which seems to go against his own views. By 1920 the nation was in the grip of commemoration as it began the erection of monuments to the war dead all across the country – and the language adopted was the language of glory, honour, dominion and power which Owen had found repugnant: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est<br>
Pro patria mori.</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/106014/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Wim Van Mierlo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Dead at 25, a week before World War I ended, Owen summed up the conflict’s waste and futility.
Wim Van Mierlo, Lecturer in Publishing and English, Loughborough University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/19919
2013-11-11T06:08:22Z
2013-11-11T06:08:22Z
100 years on, war reporting is dangerous, difficult and essential
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/34802/original/p24tqf63-1383927493.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Michael Herr's Dispatches</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">WIkimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The anniversary of Armistice Day is chance to reflect on a shameful chapter in the history of journalism. Millions were killed and maimed during World War I, about a million from Britain and its empire alone. The mechanisation of war made possible killing on a scale never foreseen. Today, some stretches of trench and craters from explosions still remain, scars on land which once was battlefield. They help us to imagine the soldiers’ lives: terror, boredom, discomfort, despair. </p>
<p>What a challenge, what an opportunity this conflict was for journalists – a challenge, alas, to which they largely proved unequal. As Philip Knightley concludes in his excellent <a href="http://phillipknightley.com/2004/09/the-first-casualty/">The First Casualty</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>More deliberate lies were told than in any other period of history, and the whole apparatus of the state went into action to suppress the truth.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The state censored; correspondents frequently cooperated. </p>
<p>Now, as the centenary of the start of the war draws near, it is the war’s poets, and not its reporters, whose writing is remembered. There must have been some uneasy encounters. In “<a href="http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/Siegfried_Sassoon">Editorial Impressions</a>”, Siegfried Sassoon shows us a correspondent recounting the “glorious time he’d had/While visiting the trenches.” The reporter rabbits on before a wounded soldier’s bitter words end the poem, “Ah, yes, but it’s the Press that leads the way.” </p>
<h2>Chequered history</h2>
<p>The history of the reporting of conflict is not a story of steady and certain progress. Much of the journalism from the First World War failed to match the standard set by <a href="http://www.greatreporters.co.uk/reporterswhrussell.htm">William Howard Russell</a>’s dispatches from the Crimea more than half a century before.</p>
<p>Russell’s account of the Charge of the Light Brigade is unlikely ever to replace Tennyson’s evocation of the “Valley of Death” in the popular imagination, but his description of the aftermath of a later action in the Crimea campaign is incomparably hard-hitting in its eyewitness realism:</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/34840/original/82yq9bw6-1384108041.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/34840/original/82yq9bw6-1384108041.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/34840/original/82yq9bw6-1384108041.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=817&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/34840/original/82yq9bw6-1384108041.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=817&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/34840/original/82yq9bw6-1384108041.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=817&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/34840/original/82yq9bw6-1384108041.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1026&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/34840/original/82yq9bw6-1384108041.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1026&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/34840/original/82yq9bw6-1384108041.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1026&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">William Russell: set the standard.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Open Library</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<blockquote>
<p>It was agonising to see the wounded men who were lying there under a broiling sun, parched with excruciating thirst, racked with fever, and agonized with pain – to behold them waving their caps faintly, or making signals towards our lines, over which they could see the white flag waving. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The reader can almost feel the dying soldiers’ blinding headaches. </p>
<p>After the failures of the First World War, journalism’s reputation was restored in the Second by reporters such as Richard Dimbleby, Ed Murrow, and Vassily Grossman. Michael Herr’s <a href="http://entertainment.time.com/2011/08/30/all-time-100-best-nonfiction-books/slide/dispatches-by-michael-herr/">Dispatches</a>, written about his experiences in Vietnam, combines reportage with literary style. It still packs a punch and remarkable freshness almost 40 years after publication. </p>
<p>The Second World War also inspired the poetry of Keith Douglas – even though one of his most memorable works, “I listen to the desert wind”, takes as its theme desolation and heartbreak, rather than soldiering. Before being killed in Normandy in 1944, Douglas had fought in the Middle East. The region was a battleground in both World Wars – and, in Syria and Iraq, has been much more recently.</p>
<h2>Dangerous assignment</h2>
<p>From 2002-2004, I was the <a href="http://www.chiswickw4.com/default.asp?section=info&page=jamesrodgers002.htm">BBC’s correspondent in Gaza</a>. In December 2003, I travelled to Iraq for a reporting assignment. A couple of weeks before I left, there was due to be a Remembrance Service in one of Gaza’s two Commonwealth War Cemeteries, the final resting places of soldiers engaged in a campaign against Ottoman forces in the First World War. </p>
<p>That year, as the second Palestinian intifada – or uprising against Israel – wore on, the ceremony was cancelled. It was too dangerous. I remember, on a later visit to one of the cemeteries, finding gravestones chipped by recent bullets. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/34839/original/z9487v3y-1384107871.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/34839/original/z9487v3y-1384107871.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/34839/original/z9487v3y-1384107871.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/34839/original/z9487v3y-1384107871.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/34839/original/z9487v3y-1384107871.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/34839/original/z9487v3y-1384107871.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/34839/original/z9487v3y-1384107871.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/34839/original/z9487v3y-1384107871.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Killed in action: Marie Colvin.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In Iraq, officially at least, I encountered optimism among the occupying powers. While I was there, Saddam Hussein was captured. I thought then of Siegfried Sassoon’s character, a “<em>gross, goggle-eyed</em>” father, whose “<em>eldest lad/Writes cheery letters from Baghdad</em>.” I wondered if another father, perhaps somewhere in the shires, was now saying something similar some 90 years later. </p>
<p>If he was, it was premature. Ten years on, there are far fewer people who think the invasion was wise. The Iraq War produced some memorable war reporting, especially once the insurgency began in 2004. The coverage of the run up to the invasion was less creditable. The New York Times was just one of the news organisations which “fell for misinformation”; at least they had the courage to admit it. </p>
<p>Where will future generations look for their first-hand accounts of that conflict - to reporters’ dispatches, or to writers’ poetry and prose? Perhaps to Kevin Powers’ <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/31/the-yellow-birds-kevin-powers-review">The Yellow Birds</a>, widely praised on publication last year. </p>
<p>Powers himself addressed the journalism or fiction issue in an <a href="http://www.bookbrowse.com/author_interviews/full/index.cfm/author_number/2236/kevin-powers">interview with Jonathan Ruppin</a> of Foyle’s bookshop. His answer was that fiction worked “in a different way,” and, he concluded, “The work that journalists do during wartime is utterly essential and, to me, incomprehensibly difficult.”</p>
<p>“Essential” and “difficult”: words to describe any great writing about war - be it journalism or literature. </p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/19919/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>James Rodgers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The anniversary of Armistice Day is chance to reflect on a shameful chapter in the history of journalism. Millions were killed and maimed during World War I, about a million from Britain and its empire…
James Rodgers, Lecturer in Journalism, City, University of London
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.