Wilfred Owen is
considered by many to be perhaps the best war poet in English, if not world,
literature. Yet, at the time of his death on November 4, 1918, only five of his
poems had been published. Thus, due to his premature death, it is clear that
Wilfred Owen was not responsible for the development of his own reputation.
Instead, it was through the efforts of his editors that Wilfred Owen and his
poetry were not forgotten on the bloody fields of France. Indeed, I would argue
that the three earliest editions of Owen's poems (Siegfried Sassoon and Edith
Sitwell, 1920; Edmund Blunden, 1931; and C. Day Lewis, 1963) were responsible
for establishing Owen's reputation and that reputation was reaffirmed by
subsequent editions. This means that in order to understand Wilfred Owen's
position in English literature, one must examine the different editions of
Owen=s poems and the agendas of each editor.
The first edition
of his poems, co-edited by Sassoon and Sitwell, created problems immediately,
as Sitwell and Sassoon argued over control of the project. After the war, Edith
Sitwell had begun to prepare the poems for publication; she had even published
seven of the poems in Wheels, the magazine she edited, and was preparing to
publish more. It was then that Sassoon became involved. Sitwell, in a letter
dated 3 October 1919, wrote to Susan Owen (Wilfred's mother) and told her,
I wrote to
Captain Sassoon, to ask him if he could
help me about
them. He came to see me; and told me
it would have
been your son's wish that (Sassoon)
should see to the
publication of the poems, because
they were such
friends. In the circumstances I could do
nothing but offer
to hand them over to him (Sitwell:
20).
Then in a letter
from late January 1920, Sitwell tells
Susan Owen that
Sassoon
has suddenly gone
off to America, leaving all you (sic)
son's manuscripts
with me to get ready for the printers
by February 1st.
Captain Sassoon has done nothing in
the way of
preparing them. All he has done in the
matter is to
arrange with Chatto and Windus to publish
them (23).
Despite Sassoon's
apparent lack of work, he still received the credit as editor. To understand fully
Sassoon's actions, it is necessary to discuss his motives for wanting the poems
published.
Sassoon realised
that Owen's work faced the possibility of being forgotten by the larger reading
audience because of Owen's untimely death. This meant that an edition of Owen's
poems had to be published very quickly. Sassoon also recognised that he, as a
former soldier and Owen's friend, could not objectively consider Owen's poetry,
so he left all critical investigation for future critics. He makes this clear in
his introduction to the edition:
The discussion of
his experiments in assonance and
dissonance...may
be left to the professional
critics...The
importance of his contribution to the
literature of the
War cannot be decided by those who,
like myself, both
admired him as a poet and valued him
as a friend. His
conclusions about War are so entirely
in accordance
with my own that I cannot attempt to
judge his work
with any critical detachment (Sassoon
v).
This, then, was Sassoon's
main motivation: to get Owen's poems in print before he was forgotten. He also
felt that the poems should be presented to the world by a veteran of the First
World War. Thus, in Sassoon's mind, Sitwell could not introduce Wilfred Owen to
the world.
Edmund Blunden's
1931 edition was intended to add the critical and biographical apparatus that
was absent from Sassoon's edition. In his introduction, Blunden writes that the
sense of his
(Owen's) promise and achievement has
deepened since 1920,
and his former editor (Sassoon)
has been
conspicuous among those who have urged the
preparation of a
new and enlarged volume of Owen's
poems, with such
biographical notice as can and
should be
prefixed to them (Blunden 3).
Edmund Blunden
was well aware of Sassoon's motives when he published his own edition:
Twelve years of
uneasy peace have passed since the
War, among its
final victims, took Wilfred Owen, and
ten since the
choice edition of his poems by his friend
Siegfried Sassoon
revealed to lovers of poetry and the
humanities how
great a glory had departed (Blunden
3).
Sassoon wanted to
show this "glory" in its raw form, and like Sassoon, Blunden felt
that the poems needed more critical attention. Unlike Sassoon, Blunden was not
a friend of Owen; thus, he was able to distance himself from Owen the person.
However, Blunden had been a soldier on the Western front; and, therefore, he
was not able to distance himself from Owen the "war poet." Both
Sassoon and Blunden wanted Owen's poetry to help society understand the nature
of the war; they, like other returning soldiers, believed that civilians in
England would not, or even could not, comprehend the events that had taken
place in France during the war. While this is what Owen had hoped his war poems
would do, the way Sassoon and Blunden presented Owen caused subsequent critics
to view Wilfred Owen the poet differently: as specifically a war poet. As a
result, critics tend to see Owen's poetry solely in terms of the war and tend
to neglect Owen's poetry in terms of poetic art and literary movements. This is
understandable as Owen's mature poetry was written during and concerned the
war.
Just as the war
affected Owen's generation, the war also affected the next generation of
writers who either grew up during the war or were born shortly after the war.
It is not surprising that, given the upheaval and the social and
self-examination caused by the war, Wilfred Owen, who so vividly portrayed the
horrors of war, became one of the most read of the war poets. The demand for
Owen's poetry was so great that between 1931 and 1963 Blunden's edition of
Owen's poems was reprinted nine times. Sassoon and Blunden had succeeded in
what they were trying to do; Owen became known and popular as a war poet.
C. Day Lewis'
edition, published in 1963, did for the generation of World War II what
Blunden's edition did for the previous generation: it showed the truth about
war. With the perception that there was a lack of a great Second World War poet
emerging from the most recent war, there was a demand for an updated edition of
Owen's poems. There was also a critical need for a new edition; after all,
there had not been an updated version of Owen's poems in thirty-two years, only
reprintings of Blunden's edition.
In his
introduction, Lewis discusses what Owen's poetry meant for the generation of
the 1930s:
The subject made
the poet: the poet made poems
which radically
changed our attitude towards war.
The front-line
poets who were Owen's
contemporaries--Sassoon,
Rosenberg, Graves,
Blunden, Osbert
Sitwell--played a most honorable
part, too, in
showing us what modern war was
really like; but
it is Owen, I believe, whose
poetry came home
deepest to my own generation,
so that we could
never again think of war as
anything but a
vile, if necessary evil (Lewis 12).
Two things are
clear from this passage. The first thing is that Lewis believed that Owen saw
war as a "vile, if necessary evil." It was Lewis' generation who saw
World War Two as a "necessary evil" because of the importance of
stopping Hitler and National Socialism. Owen's war had no Hitler and no Nazi
movement. This forced Lewis to recreate Owen's ideas in order to legitimize the
view of Lewis' generation that war is, at times, a "necessary evil".
Nowhere in Owen's poetry does he state or imply that war is necessary. For
Owen, war was the evil that had to be stopped and was never necessary.
Second, it is
clear that Lewis saw Owen strictly as a war poet. Lewis believed that the
"subject made the poet." For him the war was inextricably fused with
Owen's poetry. Owen's achievement comes not from his technical prowess or his
use of the half-rhyme but from his presentation of the war. Owen's poetry was
by this time so associated with the war that it was impossible for Lewis to
consider Owen's work in any way divorced from the war.
What Lewis does
in his edition is to reaffirm for a new generation the view of Owen as a poet
of the First World War. This view has persisted, limiting appreciation of
Owen's work. There have been attempts to change this view. Jon Stallworthy has
published an authoritative edition of Owen's complete poetry, allowing critics
also to consider Owen's non-war poetry. Dominic Hibberd and Jennifer Breen view
Owen's life more objectively. Breen is quite conscious of what she is doing in
her edition of Owen's poetry and writes, "My brief introductory sketch is
an attempt to demythologize the life of 'Owen the poet'" (Breen 2). Her
argument is that not only is the view of Owen's poetry limited by his
achievement in the war, but his biography has suffered the same fate as well.
Sassoon and
Blunden succeeded in what they set out to do. Sassoon succeeded in presenting
to the reading public, and Blunden added the necessary initial critical
apparatus. Both used Owen to explain the war to their contemporaries. While
this was appropriate and even necessary during the years immediately following
the war, it is now time to move beyond this. Critics must take the lead from
Hibberd and Breen. They must take a fresh view of Owen's work outside the myth
of Wilfred Owen and reevaluate his poetry.
Works Cited
Blunden, Edmund.
AIntroduction.@ The Poems of Wilfred Owen. London: Chatto and Windus, 1931.
Breen, Jennifer.
AIntroduction.@ Wilfred Owen: Selected Poetry and Prose. Routledge English
Texts. London: Routledge,
1988.
Lewis, C. Day.
AIntroduction.@ The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. London: Chatto and Windus,
1963.
Sassoon,
Siegfried. AIntroduction.@ Wilfred Owen: Poems. London: Chatto and Windus,
1920.
Sitwell, Edith.
Selected Letters. Eds. John Lehmann and Derek Parker. London: Macmillan,
1970.
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