Critics' Key: Poem or Personality?

174 CRITICS' KEY: POEM OR PERSONALITY? By Gertrude M. White (Oakland University) By universal critical consensus Wilfred Owen was among the best perhaps the very best - of those poets who wrote during and of World War I. Nor was recognition of hie achievement a matter of slow growth. At his death in 1918, one week before the Armistice, his work was next to unknown. Yet, only a year later, he had already been hailed by an influential critic as a poet of genius.1 Today his reputation stands higher than ever. Students invariably respond to his poetry with enthusiasm and a sense of personal identification, and Benjamin Britten's War Requiem and C. Day Lewis' 1963 edition of his Collected Poems2 have introduced his work to a wider general audience than it has hitherto commanded. Yet Owen is not even now nearly so well and widely known as he deserves. During his short life he was unknown in literary or social circles. He resolutely refused to glorify war or to adopt conventional patriotic and heroic responses to it. His stark realism and terrifying honesty are not to every taste. In addition , of course, it takes a generation or longer for the work of any period to appear in reasonably clear perspective. Two recent anthologies, Brian Gardner's Up_ the Line to Death (1964) and I. M. Parsons' Men Who March Away (1965) accord Owen's work a place of honor. Frederick Grubb's A Vision of Reality (I965), Bernard Bergonzl's Hernes· Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War (1965), and John H. Johnston'8~EngTTsh Poetry of the First World War (1964) discuss his poetry at considerable length. All these critics examine Issues first raised by early reviewers and commentators, a final answer to which has not yet been given. Were Owen's attitudes and techniques adequate to depict and evalw uate modern warfare with all Its implications? Or was hi* poetry too limited in form and too restricted by a narrowly personal and subjective point of view to measure up to the artistic possibilities Inherent In his subject? Did his pacifism limit the scope and meaning of his work? Does It display, as has been charged, an obsession with passive suffering, a response to war insufficient to support a tragic vision? Or, on the other hand, was his verse too detached from the personal and from the ordinary experiences of ordinary men? By insisting in his Preface3 on the poet's duty to warn, on the function of poetry as propaganda, wits Owen demanding, as one of his critics claims, "an over-simplification of the poet's task"?4 These are questions which have been discussed by students of Owen's poetry since It first appeared In print. It is proper that such critical Issues should be debated. Whatever the answers, the questions are posed by the nature of Owen's verse. Its Subject matter and Its attitudes, or by theories concerning the nature and function of art itself. But lately an issue of another kind has been raised by one of the most active American writers on Owen, the implications of which are Important to all students of 175 literature. Professor Joseph Cohen, In an article appearing in English Literature in Transition.5 asserts that the "key" to Owen's poetry mu&t be sought and may be found In the circumstances of his life, the nature of. his personality, and the emotional motivations that may be identified behind the themes and attitudes of his poems. More specifically, Mr. Cohen declares that this key Is Owen's latent homosexuality revealed, he believes, In the detailed portrait of Wilfred as he was In early youth amid his family by the poet's brother Harold Owen In his recently published memoirs. Journey from Obscurity.o Harold Owen's three volumes represent an astonishing performance of memory, insight, warmth, and sensitive sympathy, and Wilfred lives in his pages "in his habit, as he was." Harold's relationship with his elder brother, one of genuine love but acute albling rivalry, is drawn with scrupulous detail, objectivity, and unquenchable affection; It is a fascinating portrait of a gifted, ambitious, and very far...