In Our Time - Wilfred Owen

Episode Date: November 24, 2022

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the celebrated British poet of World War One. Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) had published only a handful of poems when he was killed a week before the end of the war, but in later decades he became seen as the essential British war poet. His works such as Anthem for Doomed Youth, Strange Meeting and Dulce et Decorum Est went on to be inseparable from the memory of the war and its futility. However, while Owen is best known for his poetry of the trenches, his letters offer a more nuanced insight into him such as his pride in being an officer in charge of others and in being a soldier who fought alongside his comrades.WithJane Potter Reader in The School of Arts at Oxford Brookes UniversityFran Brearton Professor of Modern Poetry at Queen’s University BelfastAndGuy Cuthbertson Professor of British Literature and Culture at Liverpool Hope UniversityProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, Wilfred Owen, the Great War Poet, was killed on the 4th of November 1918, seven days before the armistice. He was 25.

By then, he'd only published five poems, but in later decades, he became. seen as the British war poet, his anthem for doomed youth, Strange Meeting, Dulce et d'Eccormest, among those that became inseparable from our memory of the First World War. And while he's best known for his poetry of the trenches

and the futility of war, his letters show a more complex side, someone who took pride in his status as an officer and in being a soldier. Women to discuss Wilford O'Nar, Jane Potter, reader in the School of Arts at Oxford, Brooks University, Fran Breerton, Professor of Modern Poetry

at Queen's University of Belfast and Guy Cuthbertson, Professor of British Literature and Culture at Liverpool Hope University. Guy, what should we know about Owen's early life? Wolfred Owen was a Shropshire lad by birth, born in Oswestry in 1893. And the name Owen, of course, is a Welsh one,

and he sometimes referred to having Welsh ancestors, but if they did exist, they were a long way back. He lived in Oswestry with his maternal grandparents, his mother was from Oswesterry and he lived there until his grandfather died just before Owen reached his fourth birthday and from there there was a sense possibly of a coming down in the world

an ejection from the Shropshire Eden to his mother and to his brother as well certainly they lived in some style in there they had some servants his mother had a governess when she was a child his grandfather Edward Shaw had been a mayor he was a magistrate but actually also had debts.

And so when he died, there wasn't that much left. And they moved to Birkenhead because his father, Tom Owen, Wolfred Owen's father worked on the railways and he was a station master. So Owen then spent a good chunk of his childhood in Birkenhead on the Mersey. Some sense of class consciousness develops, though, as a result. He does talk about maybe jokingly, maybe not, talking about disowning his brother, if he acquired even the slightest trace of a Liverpool accent, for instance, comes very close to his mother. His mother has a very strong influence on him as a child

and indeed throughout his life. And it is during the Birkened years, Owen also talks about discovering poetry and becoming a poet, particularly, he thinks, on a short holiday with his mother to Broxton in Cheshire. You mentioned his touching on his class consciousness. It seems to be, according to some reports, quite marked. I mean, he very much regretted that he couldn't be sent to boarding school. I like the idea of going to boarding school because of the sort of class of people who went there and that he failed to get into Oxford, which he thought was some great castle on the hill. So after Birkenhead, where Owen was educated at Burkinehead Institute, not at Birkenhead School,

they then moved to Shrewsbury where Owen goes to Shrewsbury Technical School, but not to the famous Shrewsbury School. and there is a sense of him possibly having missed out. He became very interested in boarding school stories. He read the loom of youth and the hill later on. He was reading the boys' own paper. He wanted to write for the boys. And I'm much, much younger, but you couldn't read anything else.

If you read boy stories, they were also in public schools. And then, yes, as you say, Oxford was, as he said, a banned word because he thought he ought to be there, and it's one of his most terrible regrets that he didn't get to go to Oxford. Jane Potter, he wanted to be a poet, even before his son. He was particularly attracted by Keats. He was, and he becomes the sort of archetype of poet for Owen. He adored Keats, not just in terms of the poetry, but in terms of the lives of the poet.

He did what... What about Keats' life you do admire? I mean, Keats' life is tragic in a lot of ways. Well, it was, and I think there was an element of Keats' life that struck him, I suppose, perhaps the doomed youth in a way, and whether that was a foreshattering of his own. But he responded to the beauty of the poet. to the visceral nature of the poetry. But of course he was influenced by other poets as well.

Dante, Scott, Tennyson, Wordsworth, and Shelley, again, was the other sort of poet that really spoke to him. And he tended to do what Owen devotees now do, which is to seek out the places where they lived. He goes to visit Tinmouth and actually writes in his letters about standing outside the window, gawping. And he says, I think they were slightly alarmed by me. So I think he, on many different levels, responded to poetry in a very personal way. I think

it was John Stalworthy that said he often preferred the company of long-dead poets to other people around him. And of course, he was known as being very... My days of all the dead are spent. Yes, exactly. What I read about his childhood, and he was very interested in religion, particularly interested in Christ, particularly interested in the dying Christ and Christ's mother. Indeed. And he learns this at his mother's knee. It's the event. evangelical Christianity. He knew the Bible. He would write letters to her where he quotes passages from the Bible. It was a daily exercise reading the Bible, of course. And so these are the influences that he takes with him to the war. Why did you go to France before the war?

In search of a profession in many ways. He went to Dunstan to be a lay assistant to the vicar as he was sort of preparing to take another entrance exam. He has what we think is a breakdown, but he also has physical health problems. He breaks with evangelical and organized religion at that point, having seen the, I think the poverty in Dunstan versus the gentility of the vicarage. He found a great disparity. And it suggested that perhaps a warmer climate would be good for him.

So he goes to France. And is there when war breaks up? He is. Yes, he's a teacher at the Berlitt School, first of all, in Bordeaux. And then in July, he takes up a position with the Légerie family in Baniard de Bougar, and he has perhaps probably some of the most wonderful times of his life, but he is there when war breaks out, yes. Fran, he did enlist in 1915. What was he like as a soldier? Do we know?

We do. He seems a very unlikely soldier at the outset. I mean, he wasn't very tall. I think he was only about five foot five. And part of what Jane has been talking about, the obsession with Keats and the kind of love affair with Keats, what he liked to. about Keats was Keats being pale and interesting and a little bit frail so he was rather prone to be hypochondriacal for romantic reasons but actually

having decided to enlist and he did that a bit just before we get that what did he get out of being in France he got out of being in France as a poet the first encounter with another poet which is Laurent Teilhard and that was

hugely important of the three poets he encounters in life he was the first and said to him the only point in fighting for war is if you fight for the glories of France and the French language and French culture. So he gave Owen reason to be patriotic as a poet, if you see what to mean. And Owen was then undecided. Having decided he wanted to be a poet, he didn't know whether he was going to be of more value

to England, put very crudely, alive or dead. Am I better to survive and write or am I better to contribute as a soldier? he was torn in terms of what to do in enlistment. If we think of him as somebody, as he was obsessed with Keats and Shelley, it is entirely understandable that he was interested in the Royal Flying Corps and the idea of flight. And he saw Roland Garros performing wonderful aviation tricks in France as well, and this really enticed him.

He liked the idea of the Italian cavalry as well. So he's thinking in very romantic terms about what that enlistment is going to be. and he's thinking about it very much in terms of how it will relate to his ambition as a poet, which is being consolidated in France. He's trying to work on some long pieces for the first time. And to revert to an earlier question, do we know what he was like as a soldier? Yes, we do, and actually very good, very fit, very well liked and respected, particularly through training, extremely adept at what they wonderfully still called musketry.

So he was a great man with a rifle, not that officers got to use a rifle, Nevertheless, this garnered him a certain amount of respect from the soldiers he was working with. And he learned a number of skills, was seen as valuable enough to do additional training in certain areas and actually to help train other people as well before he'd actually had any frontline service. So I think we do see him as somebody who was, if not a natural fit, proved to be very adept at what he was asked to do. When he became an officer, that was part of his dream come true, wasn't it? and he parted his hair in the middle and grew a moustache. Yes, and cut his hair as well, none of the long flowing poet locks.

I think he went for the brutal inch all over, I seem to recall. The photographs are not necessarily that enticing in my view. But yes, he delighted in that. Now, he said, I feel I'm on a kind of crag of superiority in relation to the ordinary soldiers, and he felt very conscious of the fact that he was then in a superior position with people who'd already served and seen active service where he hadn't. whether he was entirely at ease with the more privileged elements of that office class, I think is less certain. He seemed actually to get on rather better with people coming from the provincial background that was rather more like his own.

He still holds on to his religious practice, yes, now? I would say no by this point. I think some of the questions that he asked had already been answered in about 1912, 13, as Jane has said. the difference I think is that in writing to his mother, he is not prepared to let that go entirely. I think it's a tradition that still appeals to him. And I think there are elements of the religion that still speak to him. So he will talk about Christ being in no man's land. He's not forgotten all of this, but he's not seeing any easy religious consolation. So he's actually more unhappy with organised religion. It is not to say he didn't have, which I think he did, a very profound religious sensibility. he suffered from shell shock.

Shell shock might not have been the specific term used, but certainly a shell had shocked him, and he had fallen down a cellar as well. But this doesn't recount. A shell shocked him, and he fell down a cellar, but this isn't shell shock. Plenty of debate about that. I mean, certainly when Owen turns up at Craig Lockhart,

he's not one of the worst off in terms of his condition, and he's not in a hospital bed. He is able to go around. This is a hospital around Edinburgh where people go to recover from such things of shell shock, yeah. So Owen is suffering from things. like nightmares, headaches and so forth, and he's clearly not a one fit. He is sent to Craig Lockhart, which is now in Edinburgh, was described as Slateford back then, and it was a hospital for officers.

And Owen ends up talking about it as his free and easy Oxford. It is a great time for him again, particularly a chance to meet like-minded people, poets, writers, educated public school boys, university men and Owen is in a good enough condition to be able to also go into Edinburgh, make friends there and enjoy his summer in 1917 in Edinburgh. I think you put your finger on him from what I read by saying it was his university. He met most of all. We'll come to him. We'll come to him now. Secrets Assune, but Robert Graves was there, various other poets were there and so on. But let's start with Secrecyon, who was wealthy, a published poet. Owen thought that

Toussune was bringing him on, was looking. at his work. Yeah, so Owen is not a well-known poet at all at this point, and Sassoon is. Sassoon has become the published poet and also made his name making a declaration against the conduct of the war. That's why he's in that hospital. So Sassoon looks at Owen's poems, and we can now see the corrections and suggestions that Sassoon makes, because the manuscripts still exist. Sassoon himself talks about sitting in the drafty lounge at Craig Lockett looking at Owen's poems, but he was keen to emphasise also that he doesn't create Owen the poet. Owen was a poet and who benefited from Sassoon's advice, but also you notice that Owen doesn't always take Sassoon's advice and has the

confidence to be his own poet. Can we continue this, Jane Potter? Have you any examples to mind where Sassoon helped him? In terms of the poetry or in terms of his. Yeah, we can see on the manuscript, is it of Dulcote to Coromest in particular or an ampton for doomed youth. Yes. Yes. as well, where he crosses out, suggests lines and so forth in pencil. We can still see that. So he's essentially helping Owen, I think, to harden his verse in a way, harden the poetry. Owen, in fact, writes to his mother that he says, you know, certain things he thought were wonderful, other things he thought were trite. But as guy said, I think it was, he knew Owen was a poet. I think someone like Sassoon would not have given him the time of day, ordinarily, because

Owen approaches him, as he says, as a tiresome little knocker at your door, and he comes bearing copies of the old huntsman for him to sign as this sort of acolyte. And I think, I would imagine that Sassoon would have been, oh, that's very nice, thank you very much, and I have some poems. Oh, yes, you have some poems for me. And I think he looked at them and went, actually, I have a poet here. I don't just have someone who dabbles. Their relationship became quite close, didn't it?

It was very close. It was very profound. Owen writes to him towards the end of one of his last letters in the last years of his life that he thinks of him as he has this great sort of equation, my father confessor and so forth. And he says, you know, I love you dispassionately. And what that relationship would have become after the war, I think, in light of Owen's death, I think as Sassoon got older, that there was a real loss of what could have been,

both as a, you know, in terms of his friendship, or in terms of the late. legacy for English poetry. Was there a slight disturbance in the mood of Sussune when, as time went on, after the death of Owen, people used to ask Susson, not about Susson, but about what do you thought of Owen's poems? I think there were times when that became slightly tiresome, yes. I can imagine it. Yes. And I think it might be the case for most of the war poets who survived about asking about the ones who didn't survive.

Fran, can we talk a bit more about Craig Lerner, and how it affected his poetry. Anta of the doomed youth is a good start, but the place itself seems to be, as I said, have something of the university about it, and Owen was particularly free. He could wander into the town, he could wander about the place.

So I think it would be useful to develop that because that's where we see him developing as a poet who became a published poet. It is absolutely. The freedom came with certain constraints. They couldn't go into pubs, for instance. But he was very lucky in the medical advisor. was given, Dr. Brock, who worked on a kind of therapy that was really, I suppose I'd almost

call it a work therapy, go away and learn things, study things. So the consultations he had with him were almost like the tutorials that he'd never been able to experience. He was editing the Hydra, the journal there. And as Guy has said, he was with well-educated people. It was a hospital for officers. In relation to Sassoon, he was the tiresome knocker at the door. And I think as soon was a little more patronising towards him during his lifetime than he subsequently would have liked to pretend. So he does refer to him quite often to little Owen and that he's quite promising and so forth. He's not full of driving enthusiasm for this is the greatest thing. He becomes much more protective of him and much more defensive through the 1920s. And Graves is a little

patronising towards him too. Yes, Robert Graves. He thinks he has promise and that you know, if he develops in the right way, he will help Sassoon and Robert Graves. They will all three of them reimagine English poetry after the war. So they do see him slightly in those apprentice terms. At the same time, Owen does indeed through that show his own style, his own distinctiveness. When he writes the, I would call it a love letter that Jane's reference to Sassoon saying, you are Keats and Christ and Elijah and everything to me and I love you so very much, He knows that Sassoon is going to be embarrassed.

But what he says in that letter is that you have fixed me. And I think he means that poetically, because all the imagery is there in Owen. All the preoccupations are there with life and death and the big questions. Where Sassoon fixes him, I think, is to give him social purpose. And that's what comes through in 1917 that isn't there in 1916. In terms of frontline experience, there's not much difference between them. You know, Sassoon hadn't spent much longer.

in the front line than Owen, and Owen had probably had much worse a time. But Sassoon says, right, realistically, think about this in terms of protest, because he was very much being coloured by that through the Bloomsbury Group, having done his own declaration against the war and done that very publicly. So he's encouraging Owen to be much more of a protest poet than Owen had necessarily thought of being, and I think that ties in that kind of social purpose with the kind of therapy that he's going through at Craig Lockhart at the time as well. Jane, you want to come in. The other thing that Sassim did for him

was to give him this entree into a literary world that he would not have ordinarily had. So during the time that he's on home leave, he's able to, he meets the publisher William Heinemann, he goes to Graves' wedding, he meets Osbert Sitwell, he's asked by the Sitwells to present his poems to them. And on the same point that Fran and Guy make

about him pushing back, we have evidence of the letters where he says no thanks Mr. Grave, I'll find my own path. Or he says he'd like to find out what the Sitwells do before he agrees to publish with them. So he isn't just blindly accepting all of this. He is still very much developing his own person, his own individual personality as a poet,

and we can see him maturing. Yeah, I think it's partly to do with the influences we talked about earlier, very much 19th century and before. He hadn't encountered very much modern poetry, Nor would he, really. By the start of the war, he might have read some Harold Monroe, he'd read some Yates. But this is all new territory to Owen.

He's both dazzled by it, but he's also canny about where he's going to position himself and what he's going to publish and why. Guy, can we talk about one of the poems, maybe two or three others as we go on? There's one he drafted Craig Lockhart disabled, for example. Can you tell us about that and why that's good? So this is one that he drafted

actually in October towards the end of his time at Craig Locker and then he finished it in fact the following year and it is one of the most famous Owen poems now it's often one people will study at school but it is a wonderful poem very much a Scottish one Can you give us a line of two before?

He sat in a wheelchair waiting for dark and shivered in his ghastly suit of grey legless sewn short at elbow through the park voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn voices of play and pleasure after day till gathering sleep had mothered them from him. About this time town used to swing so gay when glow lamps budded

in the light blue trees and girls glanced lovelier as the air grew dim in the old times before he threw away his knees. Now he will never feel again how slim girls' waists are or how warm their subtle hands. All of them touch him like some queer disease. And so one important person who saw this was Robert Graves. So this is the poem that made Robert Graves think, wow, we've got a proper poet here. And it was only in draft forms, as I said then, it was drafted during his time at Craig Lockup and not finished until the following year until not long before Owen's death, actually. And we'll see even in those lines, though, the way that Owen is able to move from a very high kind of poetic language, talking about the past, talking about the beauty of a pre-war life,

the beauty of the parking of girls, and this kind of twilight time of glow lamps budding in the light blue trees, and then quickly shifting to that very blunt, of realistic, hard-hitting language before he threw away his knees. And this is Owen finding that style, finding what styles are suitable for his subject matter, and delighting in playing with language, but also understanding that there is that Sasunish aspect of a need to be direct and straightforward at times as well, particularly when talking about the conduct of the war. Fran, can we just have a few paragraphs on what he did, what he's alive in the war, going into the tunnels. There's

the life in the trenches. Now this has been said again and again and again, but let's relate it to Owen. Yeah, so Owen's experience, it is two quite condensed periods. The first is really January 1917 and then again in March 1917

before he's invalided out. That includes, by and large, the experience that you see in the poems, which is that of being absolutely freezing cold and as well as terrified. So poems like exposure come out of that experience. He's also very aware, having been invalided out and behind the lines, poems like disabled come from seeing the suffering in clearing stations, in hospitals. And he'd seen that

before. He'd seen that even before he joined up. He didn't join up in ignorance of the certain things that were happening to people. He saw it in his time in France. So that, there was an intensity to the period that he spent in the trenches. It was a difficult part of the line. Did he have an attitude the sort of language you should use when he's writing about what was happening in the trenches? No, I think what you see both in the letters and the poems is seeking to find a way of expressing the inexpressible. One of the things that makes the letters so brilliant to read

is that he's continually seeking for more and more images that, you know, as we say, fresh images beget, recognising that part of what he's trying to describe is beyond the reach of language. Does anything come to mind what you're saying? Well, I'm thinking of the very well-known letter that Jane will probably be able to quote better than me when he's trying to describe no man's land

and he says it's like the face of the moon you know it's crater it's and he goes on in quite an intense paragraph trying to try and capture some of its essence but struggling to do that you would see the same and it's one of the things he's criticised for in a sense that over-adjectival kind of writing overwriting

shamis heaney called it that we see in something like dulce et decoramest yeah but the overriding in dolce and decoramist really were Of course it absolutely works. So it made, but where it makes people uncomfortable is that where you've got things like the devil's sick of sin and this kind of heavily, densely saturated language, is there almost a kind of aesthetic pleasure

and the sound of it for its own sake and how troubling is that when we're listening to what the poem is actually telling us about the suffering of war? So it's a style that works because of the kind of saturation with language and beauty and descriptiveness, but is also troubling to people for that same reason.

Jane, do you all go I want to read a few lines? Would you like me to read from the letter? Yeah. So the one that Fran is mentioning, which is also one of my favorites, is written on the 16th of January 1917, starting my own sweet mother, as he does many of his letters. Part of the letter reads,

I can see no excuse for deceiving you about these last four days. I have suffered seventh hell. I have not been at the front. I have been at the front of it. I held an advance post, that is, a dugout in the middle of No Man's Land. We had a march of about three miles over Sheld Road, then nearly three along a flooded trench. After that, we came to where the trenches had been blown flat out and had to go over the top. It was, of course, dark, too dark.

The ground was not mud, but not sloppy mud, but an octopus of sucking clay. And then he goes on to talk about No Man's Land as like the face of the moon, chaotic. crater-ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness. Yes. And he talks about going to the train. It's like going into a tunnel, doesn't it? He does, and that, of course, comes up in strange meeting and this idea of the descent into hell as well. Yes. Guy, you want to smoke. I just wanted to, in a way, take us back to Craig Locker, because there's a really interesting little poem called Six o'clock in Princess Street, where he's offering us that choice that Fran and Jane have been talking about, between having your head in the clouds,

living in a world of imagination and creativity and fantasy or having your feet on the ground. And he's in the street thinking about, in a sense, where he belongs. His style, of course, in his poetry, is trying to bring both of those together. But he's thinking about how can he respond to this experience that is around him. Do you have that in front of you?

Yeah. In twos and threes, they have not far to roam. Crowds that Thread Eastwood gave eyes. Those seek no further than their quiet home, wives walking westward slow and wise. Neither should I go fooling over clouds, following gleams unsafe, untrue, and tiring after beauty through star crowds,

dared I go side by side with you. Or be you in the gutter where you stand, pale rain-floored phantom of the place, with news of all the nations in your hand and all their sorrows in your face. So that's a poem which we assume is addressing a boy in the gutter selling newspapers, newspapers, of course, which would carry the news of the war. Fan you would it come in.

Just curiosity where he's putting something as a choice in that poem, and very often people say he told the truth of war, he didn't see the beauty. But actually when he talks of tiring after beauty in that poem, he finds a different way of doing so in the trenches and says, I have seen much beauty in that horror of war. But what he also says going along with that is, but you, you who are outside this experience, cannot perceive it, cannot enjoy it, cannot appreciate it.

It's not to say that it isn't there. It is there alongside the horror of war in the same way that going back to Kutes again, he sees both the suffering and the beauty simultaneously. But it's a very exclusive position, I think, that he's holding that we are not allowed to be consoled by that vision of beauty. It belongs to those who shared the suffering with him.

Can we go to what many people think is his most famous poem? Dulce et Decoramast Propacho Mori there's an irony in that isn't there? Because lots and lots It's a wonderful poem but the

fact that it's in Latin is sort of part of his dream isn't it really that he uses the Latin which shows he's an educated man to finish and it's perfect these are the end lines from Dulceed Decoramist

If you could hear at every jolt the blood come gargling from the froth corrupted lungs obscenous cancer bitter as the cud of vile incurable sores

on innocent tongs my friend you would not tell with such high zest to children ardent for some desperate glory the old lie Dulce and decorumest propatria Mori

Dulce it is a sweet and meat thing to die for your country the old lie he talks about that And he precedes that with a lot of maybe too many, fine, too many adjectives. I'd rather like them about people dying and choking to death. It's horrible.

I mean, those last two lines are, but the idea that it's glorious to die for your country was widespread. Absolutely. So he's gotten on to that. And he's saying, children don't listen. This is a lie. That's right. And that there may be some, you know,

there is the camaraderie of the soldiers, the suffering that they have. have together, but in terms of there's no beauty in war. It's not a beautiful thing. And that's what he shows us. And I think that's why this poem in particular, Dulce de Kormast, is still read, because in many ways it describes warfare wherever you are. And I think it, because it's such a visual poem, it's very visceral. He shows us this and we cannot possibly look away. And so in that way, it's a very modern poem. It's almost a 21st century poem. We can look on the news and find these horrific images, and so it's not

just rooted in the First World War, and I think that's why Owen's poetry like this poem still has great resonance. Although he didn't publish, it wasn't published in a laparise, did his poem circulate in around his friends and comrades? He edited the trench magazine, didn't he?

It was the hospital magazine, yes, the Hydra. And he had a couple of his poems published there. He did. There are only five in his lifetime. A couple went into the Sitwell wheels anthology as well. He wasn't known, really, and his circulating amongst his friends, that was quite a small group still. He'd only started to forge those literary friendships right at the, in the last year of the war, and not until Sassoon collects some of his poems in 1920 and puts

them out there. Does he have any kind of public profile? Even then, I would say it is fairly limited. We all know that the best-selling war poet through the 20s is Rupert Brooke. It's not Wilfred Owen. But over time, and this is back to Jane's point, they've stood the test of time because they speak far beyond their original occasion. I think most of them carry a little bit of anti-female sentiment, including Dolce de Coromest, also the disabled. What's anti-female about Dolce de Coromis? Because it is very specifically targeted as the people at the time would have known towards the female poet Jesse Pope, who was encouraging people to enlist. And he puts that in the draft. to a certain poetess to Jesse Pope, and she's the one who was writing all that awful propagandist poetry who's for the trench, are you, my laddie, and so forth.

I didn't know that. But if I may depend on Jesse Pope, I think one of the issues is that he cancels it because he, I think, that, you know, he has, the second bit is to, for Jesse Pope, etc. So he's referring to others like her, but she was probably one of the more well-known sort of propagandists, but Pope was writing.

lots of other doggerel sort of verse. But I think that he, I think the cancellation of that made it much more universal. It wasn't just about her. But yes, as soon as people saw that dedication on the manuscripts, then that was where it became an anti-sort of female

or people suggested it was anti-fuel. He's not as extremists as soon on this, but it's there in the disabled two the giddy jilts. This is why somebody joins up to impress the women who then don't want them anymore, who look over, the broken bodies to the men who are whole, whereas in fact women stood by injured and mutilated soldiers

and so there is little impatience with that. But again, with the disabled, it was a poem I almost could not read during COVID and lockdown because of its final lines and the loneliness and the suffering in that which speak anywhere and to any time how cold and late it is. Why don't they come and put him to bed? Why don't they come? Can you, a guy, When did he start to become better known after his death? Just before his death, actually, there is a sense of Owen thinking about getting a collection of poems together. And he's thinking about indeed which ones he would include and who might be able to publish it. And as we heard, very few of his poems were published during his lifetime.

There were some exceptions. Miners, a very interesting example, which appeared in the nation. And then a futility in hospital barge also appeared in the nation. and it was after Owen's death that Sassoon writes the introduction to poems, which is 1920. And that collection is not all of the poems that we would now think of as Owens, but it's got all the famous ones in, essentially. And that did have an impact. So something of the kind of old idea of Owen is that he's not famous until the 1960s.

That's not quite true. I mean, the poem in 1920 gets reviewed pretty much everywhere. where immediately people pick out strange meeting, for instance, as a great Owen poem, John Middleton Murray in the Nation and Atheneum in 1921 does this kind of well-known review in which he's full of praise for strange meeting. And Owen is a well-known poet during the 20s, but he's well-known possibly within the world of poets and reviewers rather than the wider public. And also he can't ignore the fact that he was well hated by Yates,

who thought he was a terrible poet and tried to say, sort of attack him in every possible opportunity? Well, I think Yates particularly has an attack on Owen in the 1930s. You've attacked him more than once, I'm trying to depend Yates on what you're doing. Well, I mean, Fran would know probably more than I do, but I think Yates is famous for his remarks about Owen in 1936. You said it was, well, you tell me what he said. Well, I mean...

I think partly Yates is picking up on something that you've already asked, which is how well known was Owen and who was he taken up by, and Owen was taken up by the 30s generation to a large extent, people like Ord and Mniz Spender and their ideas about socialism or communism. So Owen is published again at the start of the 30s. I don't think Yates had read him terribly extensively. What he did say was that he'd excluded him from the Oxford Book of Modern Verse because he had a distaste for certain poems written in the midst of the Great War

and said passive suffering is not a theme, for poetry. Unfortunately, in a way, he follows that up in a letter where he says, my anthology continues to sell, the critics grow more and more angry. When I excluded Wilfredoan, whom I consider unworthy of the poet's corner of a country newspaper, I did not know I was excluding a revered sandwich-board man of the revolution, as your 30s generation dig, and that someone has put his worst and most famous poem, D'Alte de Coromest, in a glass case at the British Museum. However, If I'd known it, I would have excluded him just the same. He is all blood, dirt and sucked sugar stick.

There is every excuse for him, but none for those who like him. There's not much coming back from that, in a sense, but what Yates does say is he criticises him for the very things that Owen learned from Yates. He says, look at that selection in Michael Roberts' earlier anthology. He talks about bards and maids and Titanic Wars. That's because Owen is saturated in early Yates. he didn't get to see the Yates after 1914. He didn't get to see what Yates became.

Just to add to that, I mean, in Yates' defence, there were plenty of other major poets who weren't particularly keen on Owen either. And if you look at Elliot, for instance, there is one passing reference to Wilfred Owen in a letter in 1925 to Robert Graves. And then later in life, very late in life, Elliot picks out Strange Meeting as a particularly great poem. Yes, he says Strange Meeting to Grosven. But by implication, the other ones, he doesn't think quite so much about. Are you sure?

But it's strange meeting that Elliot does only pick on as being particularly moving and also a technical accomplishment of some originality. So Owen's not really, as Fran said, a poet for the modernist necessarily. It is the 30s generation like Orden who turned to Owen. And do so in part because they see in Owen a social passion and commitment that is exemplary for the kind of thing they want to do. So Owen has been picked up at subsequent points in the century by people struggling to know how to respond to difficult situations.

It's why he's picked up by Hini Longley in the early years of the troubles. He's picked up by the poets from Vietnam in the 1960s. Poet W.E.R. Hart read him, and I think he has continued to be a touchstone for people writing about war, particularly the mental suffering of war even now. And I think the sort of you could just Google him or have a Google alert. and any time war is mentioned, Owen is there. Whether it's a specific poem or quoting the pity of war or the truth of war or the old lie,

he is there as the sort of touchstone for anything. Unfortunately, a lot of the time re-quoting the poetry is in the pity, which was certainly hammered into me at school and probably many other people and I think is not at all what is happening here. And Geoffrey Hill probably had it right when he turned that on his head and said no, the extent to which Owen professed poetry means that the pity is in the poetry, not the other way around.

Yeah, so maybe we should say something about the preface, because when Owen's poems are published in 1920, there is a draft preface included there, which Owen had scratched out. Possibly he would never have actually included it in a final version of his poems, but it is included, and that includes these lines which have become as famous as the poems, including about pity and his subject being war, and his role is to warn. and actually potentially that preface has had a negative effect

in terms of Owen being misunderstood as a result of that preface. Because poetry is in the period, because of that phrase. Because he says above all I am not concerned with poetry, well he is. Above all he is concerned with poetry. And it is that drive to be concerned that actually enables him to do what he does for our understanding of the war. But just but it's interesting that you don't give him his conviction. He says that and you say no, he's wrong.

I think something else is at me. I have never believed that any poet is the best critic or judge of what they themselves write. That's a point of view, yeah. But in this, I think he's trying to think about how he's packaged and presented. He's very young with the first body of work, thinking about how he appears to the world as the poet of war and as kind of presenting himself on that stage, and he's trying to make a kind of passionate social argument.

but if the poems were only a social argument or a documentary of the suffering of war, we wouldn't be reading them a hundred years later. And it is precisely his ability with sound, with language, with song that makes us remember. It's his facility with words. He isn't just putting words on a page. We remember him even, you know, reading the lines of poetry

or even reading the letters. He's even laying out certain lines in the letters almost as poetry. And he indeed does that in the preface. He does, and so we're forced to read it in a way with that cadence. There's a certain way that he's playing with that. And I think I agree with God. I don't think it was quite finished,

but I think it has become really his sort of... Immediately it is picked up. So it clearly has an impact, even if it's not necessarily the best piece of literary criticism of Wilfred Owen's poems, that preface is a wonderful piece of writing in its own right. I think where he's absolutely right, actually, just is where he says this is not about glory, honour, might, majesty.

And it's, as he was saying, he recognises the need for a different kind of language and a different understanding of language. So that when we have Hemingway, many years later, saying abstract terms such as glory or honour are kind of obscene. Next to the names of Rhodes. Owen is there first. Owen understands it first. When he says, you know, it is the duty of the poet to warn, he's talking about being

absolutely tuned in to the way language, discourse, even the nature of poetry is changing in response to what's happening around it. Could we end by talking about his final letter? Who's coming in on that? Heather? Yes. We've been, it's very poignant letter, a very upsetting one, of course, it was written just four days before he died and he's in, as he calls it himself, the smoky cellar of the Forrester's House, which is a tiny space.

It is hard to comprehend how the number of men who were in that, were in it, it's even harder to comprehend that he was writing a letter while there. It's a beautiful letter. He's writing in reassurance to her. To his mother, yes, to his mother, with the poignancy of knowing what happened to him a few days later, that he is probably dead as she receives this, I think. He says, it is a great life. There is no danger down here. If any, it will be well over before you read these lines. and then he says

I hope you are as warm as I am as serene in your room as I am here of this I am certain you could not be visited by a band of friends half so fine as surround me here sorry I'm getting quite emotional reading it I think it's a good place to conclude

thank you all very much thanks to Fran Beerton Jane Potter and Guy Cupperton and our studio engineer Michael Millum next week the Morant Bay Rebellion, 1865, the struggle of formally enslaved Jamaican people for their rights and the split in Britain over its brutal suppression. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

What didn't you say that you'd like to observe? We didn't say a great deal about Owen and children and the idea of Owen as a teacher as well and his relationship with his mother possibly as well. we didn't say a great deal about. So Owen trains as a teacher. We mentioned that preface at the end about idea of warning, and originally in the draft it said warning children in particular. We talked about Delcate Decorumest having this focus on the way children are being educated about war. Owen refers again and again to the idea of children. We got them at the start of disabled with the children playing in the park. About a third of the poems he writes after the age of 21 refer to children,

even more of them referred to young boys and lads as well. He connects himself with childhood and children with a desire to kind of escape modern, kind of current reality, I suppose, and escape the war into a world of play. And he talks about the Garden of Boyhood and so forth when he's in Bordeaux and later on when he's thinking about life before the war and his mother. And other people refer to Owen as being very childlike. Repeatedly people talk about as being boyish or being a very young child, looking young as well, being childlike in his appearance, but also in his manner.

And a lot of the talk about Owen actually ends up coming down to ideas of growing up, maturity, immaturity, at what point did Owen mature as a poet? Was it the Western Front that makes him grow up? And he talks about himself in those terms. But even late in the war and even late in his life, people are still talking about him as being incredibly childlike and boyish. And how did the childlikeness reveal itself? I think in terms of his shyness in some cases, I guess it's added to that he was, as Fran said, 5 foot 5, so there's a sense of it, has a scene called him Little Owen, but there is a sense of him too being quite nervous,

and now that partly was the effect of the shot from a shell, which we talked about in terms of Craig Lockhart's bad nerves and so forth, but also his interests. He was interested in a world of King Arthur, which we haven't really talked about very much, or fairies, children's literature, and I know Melvin you said boarding school stories are pretty much all it was to read as a child, but Owen was reading them as an adult, which is the interesting thing. You know, as a grown man, even after the Western Front, he is reading boys' boarding school stories. So there's something very childlike about him reading the hill or the loom of youth at that age. And also his interest in play and his desire to seek out children as well to kind of semi-adopt and play with even as a grown-up.

Can I go for the darker side of Owen? The Owen we haven't mentioned, which is Owen the killer, if we like, you know, that we haven't touched on so much some of the ways he talks about the joy of being in battle, the way he talks about taking people out with a smile, with his revolver, the citation for the military cross, which says it is the number of enemy that he is destroyed. And that side of him has to be understood

along with the protest as well, that the protest is validated by his success as the killer, and he talks about himself as the conscientious objector with the very seared conscience, that he has to be guilty, in a sense, in order to be able to write the way he does. If there was anything else I maybe would have liked to touch on, there's the irony of that poignancy of that final letter.

Also, I think, of the gravestone itself. He's buried in the communal cemetery at, or is now most of the people around him are children. To guys point, they're 18-year-olds, 19, people who were caught right at the tail end of the war. So Owen at 25 is one of the eldest there, and the inscription chosen for his tomb is from one of his poems, The End I assume it was chosen by his mother, I meant it, yes. Shall life renew these bodies of a truth, all death will annul. That's what's on the tombstone.

But the real tombstone, I think, is the purpose. poem, which then turns that into a question. Of a truth, all death will he an all tears assuage, and by the end of the poem, he says, it is death. My ancient scars shall not be glorified, nor my titanic tears, the sea be dried. The poem refuses the consolation that is left without the question mark on the grave itself. You want to come in? I think two things. I think one is perhaps the other side to the, to the, to the, to the darker side of Owen is his sense of humor. And we don't get that in the poems, but we get that in the letters. He was a great one for caricature. He was able to mimic people's speech.

He took great delight and perhaps in performance to his mother of explaining the people that he met of he didn't suffer fools. He had a great sense of fun. And I think the other point, too, would be about the influence of France as a teacher, the influence of French literature. The influence of French literature. He was, as Fran mentioned, introduced to this by Lawrence Talad, who introduced him to Baudelaire and Flaubert and Verlain, but he was also doing this reading himself. And he loved being in France. It was, again, one of the happiest times of his life. He was teaching, he was teaching children, he was enjoying reading, being the autodidact. And I think it influenced him greatly when then he returns to France as a soldier.

And I think it's very poignant that he is buried in France, and he's very much adopted by the French. And every year on the 4th of November, the tiny village of Ors does a procession to the grave and a ceremony at the grave, followed by usually a reception in the Sal de Fet, and then a concert of some kind. And that happens every year, not just in the centenary,

but every year. And I think that the affection that the French have for him says a lot about his, devotion to French literature, but the way that people respond to him on a personal level. And I think that comes through the poetry, but also through the letters. And I find that amazing. You're right. Of course, there's just something we never mentioned, which is how far when he does write about war,

he's indebted to French literature in terms of allie babes. That's right. And under fire. Yes. I've forgotten the French title. Lefer. Thank you. And how far that first realistic depiction of war actually seeps into his own poems.

And it's as French literature, as much as English literature, that influences him, I think, that tension between the aestheticism and the realism. And that's what he's blending. There's writing and talk about Owen being gay, as indeed Sassoon was. It's very difficult to say definitively what somebody's experiences. I think there is no doubt, and I think anybody would dispute that Owen fell in love with men. Now, in Keats's case, Keats was dead. but with Sassoon, he absolutely fell in love with him.

I don't think that relationship went beyond the kind of intense friendship that Jane has already talked about. So I think those feelings are absolutely there. Whether I'm going to be sufficiently literary theorist to say, I think there is no core. I think he had attractions to women at certain points too. So to say Owen was gay is a little too stark for the complexity of human emotion and experience. that somebody in their early 20s and late teens is actually experiencing. I think that's right.

And I think we need to put his experience as a young man in this period into context. We don't have evidence for many of the things that may have been alleged, I suppose, over the years about his relationship with men, physical relationships. We don't have any evidence of that. That isn't to say that we can't recognize, and I'm glad we're at a situation in our society where we can recognize. the way in which he interprets and presents us the male body in states of beauty and also in horror, and that we can look at that without feeling any kind of upsetness that may have had happened,

say, with, we know that his brother Harold, for instance, got very upset if this was discussed, and he said, well, he only hung around with the literary types, etc. So there was a very much defensive attitude, and I don't think we need to do that anymore. and I think he was very attractive to women. We know that from his letters. We know that he, and sometimes, especially in France, he had to sort of fight them off with a stick, if we can say that. And he has to constantly reassure his mother.

And I think much of the discussion about, well, he doesn't talk about women except in this rather more negative way, we have to think about it as reassuring his mother that he's not being seen in inappropriate relationships. and there was something more comfortable about a sort of homosocial world than anything else. So I think we have to be quite careful and especially how we use the term gay. I think we have to see.

I think Sassoon introduced him to ideas of thinking about homosexuality. Yes. And ideas of thinking about them at that time, not in terms of actual sexual encounters, but in terms of the idealized male friendship and the long tradition of that. So he learned from Sassoon that this is a concept one could think about, one could explore at least intellectually, if not physically. I think the evangelical tradition would have been very strong behind particular behavioural activity anyway at the time.

I'm just going to say another thing maybe we didn't say much about was par rhyme or assonance, the things that everyone has to do when you do Owen at school. but which actually was noticed by a lot of people in the kind of early days of reception. It would be interesting for our listeners if you talked about that. So assonance was the term used usually at the time. Actually, it was quite a confusing term because it means two things which are the opposite of each other. What we mean by it, in this case,

is where the consonants rhyme in the rhyme word at the end of the line, but the vowel sounds don't. So a good example would be strange meeting where you get friend, frowned, killed, cold, mystery, mastery, that kind of thing. So these are a kind of half-rhyme, but very specific type. And Owen essentially adopts this as Owen's style. It doesn't use it in every poem, but it becomes a very distinctive style.

And one that doesn't really have very much in the way of precursors. Other people do use something similar. Harold Monroe, who had a collection of poems actually called Strange Meetings, which presumably was part of the influence on Owen's title of Strange, meeting. There is a poem in there where he uses something similar. So there are examples in earlier literature, but it is very much now a distinctive Owen thing. And if you do it as a poet now, you are making a kind of reference back to Owen because of that style. Some people actually complained that it does slightly distract from the subject matter because the style is so in your

face and so distinctive. But it is also very powerful. And immediately, reviewers picked up on the I did. It was representing a certain idea of disconnection or fragmentation. The fact that things don't connect during the war and the way that the rhymes only half work somehow. And it's also a lowering effect. We get the lowering from a rising sort of sense at the end of a line to very much a descent. And I think that's where, and it gives that somber feel when you're reading it. And it's particularly in strange meeting, which I actually don't think is it finished in and of itself. And he may have refined that more. But because those end lines have that

lowering tone, you get the effect of down some profound dull tunnel. It gives you the oral effect of what's happening. Oral is in the sound. Yeah. I'm just thinking there's a lovely example in exposure as well, where

the stair snow-dazed and then we drowse, sun-dosed. That's right. Yeah, it's beautiful. Well, it'll also rhyme, the winds that nive us. And then we curious and nervous and the way the rhymes are talking to each other as well. But more subtly in those cases, I think it stands out less in this poem,

perhaps, than in Strange Meeting. That's right, and I think that's why I think that the, you know, Strange Meeting would have been refined even more and it would have been less jarring. And if you look at the manuscripts, I think there have been decisions made by editors posthumously to make that a complete poem, in many ways, much like the preface.

but in something like exposure or spring offensive, it's sublime. Somehow the rhymes that don't quite work in poetry are often some of the best, aren't they? From the war, I'm thinking of Adelstraught by Edward Thomas ending with Misty and Gloucestershire. We shouldn't work as a rhyme, but somehow really does. And I think there's something about that with a lot of these. Well, to rhyme with meaning, I will say that's also Yatesian indebtedness, just to pop him back in a positive light. Well, well done.

Does anyone like tea or coffee? There you go. Coffee, please. Coffee. Thank you. Get me to the airport. Thank you so much. Three coffees, Melvin, do you want anything for you?

Yeah, I'll almost. A tea, we'll be fine, thank you. One, two, three copies, thank you. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Lauren LeVern here, with news of a very successful Desert Island Discs rescue. They've been missing for decades. David Hockney. I went to the arts.

And they asked me if I had a private income. And I said, I didn't know what that was. And they said, well, if you've not got one, you can't be an artist. Because we'll never make a living at it. Dame Margot Fontaine. What I've always looked forward to most in my life would be an old age on a desert island just saying gramophone records all day long. And Bing Crosby.

Could you build a house? No way. Shelter. No way. I couldn't fix a safety pen. But they're all back in Radio 4's Desert Island Discs Archive, thanks to the efforts of keen vintage tape collectors. To listen to them, along with Dudley Moore, Sophie Tucker, Noel Coward and dozens of other castaways,

just head to the Desert Island Discs website.