(Others have written about Owen, here, in various contexts. Their diaries are better; more effort was put into them. But I figure that Owen's work can't be over-pimped.)
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
- Anthem for Doomed Youth
The English poet
Wilfred Owen was killed during the final Allied advance of World War I, on November 4, 1918, one week before the Armistice. (I read somewhere that his parents were delivered the news literally as the celebratory bells were ringing in England.) His poetry, grounded in his extensive war experience, is stark and compelling.
The Charge of the Light Brigade, it ain’t.
The main reason that I recommend it to others at every opportunity, is because it’s great; Owen is easily among my half-dozen all-time favorite poets. But I must confess that I also see in it something of an antidote to the fatuous glorification of militarism, which continues, to all-too-great a degree, to this day.
- These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.
Memory fingers in their hair of murders,
Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.
Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander,
Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.
Always they must see these things and hear them,
Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles,
Carnage incomparable and human squander
Rucked too thick for these men's extrication.
- Mental Cases
Owen’s poetry isn’t fundamentally about description of the horrors of trench warfare; it’s about his humanity. (As an aside, also note the complex patterns of rhyme and alliteration. But that’s for the professors to go on about.)
Those other wretches, how they bled and spewed,
And one who would have drowned himself for good,—
I try not to remember these things now.
Let dread hark back for one word only: how
Half-listening to that sentry's moans and jumps,
And the wild chattering of his broken teeth,
Renewed most horribly whenever crumps
Pummelled the roof and slogged the air beneath—
Through the dense din, I say, we heard him shout "I see your lights!"
But ours had long died out.
- The Sentry
I’m not trying to present Owen as a knee-jerk pacifist. He “got” complexity; all great artists do. (Hemingway’s
A Farewell to Arms and “Soldier’s Home” are hardly pro-war, but he was reportedly infuriated at James Jones’s presentation of Army life in
From Here to Eternity.) But I think that it’s safe to assert that Owen would have been rather disgusted by - actually, perhaps just more contemptuously dismissive of - the worthless likes of the
Chickenhawks.
Humanity should have got beyond war by now; in fact, it should have happened, long since. And it can, no matter what pompous, facile idiots (“there will always be war; it’s the nature of the beast”) might try to claim. It can happen a lot faster, too, if we can just get, and keep, the g**-damned warmongering righties out of the way.
Here’s a collection of much of Owen’s work. It’s been suggested that, had he lived, he may have become the key figure in a school of English poetry that was a more directly expressive, less muted and detached, alternative to that of Eliot and his followers.
(Cross-posted from MN Progressive Project, where my username is dan.burns)