UNLIVING HANDS: LYRIC DISTANCE IN OWEN'S “ANTHEM FOR DOOMED YOUTH”

4 4 Y U N L I V I N G H A N D S L Y R I C D I S T A N C E I N O W E N ’ S ‘ ‘ A N T H E M F O R D O O M E D Y O U T H ’ ’ A D A M K E L L E R In the preface to his then unpublished oeuvre, Wilfred Owen characterized his poems as elegies, a move that has sparked much debate among his few devoted critics about the generic boundaries of his work. Owen’s poems are elegies (if only because he says so), yet they often seem to probe, contest, and subvert the genre’s longstanding conventions. Owen’s generic changes have proved too discordant for some. W. B. Yeats was not among those inclined to read Owen’s poems as elegies. In fact, judging from his editorial decisions and correspondence, he preferred not to read them at all. As editor of the 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse, Yeats excluded Owen’s work and that of his contemporary ‘‘trench poets’’ on the grounds that ‘‘passive su√ering is not a theme for poetry,’’ crassly dismissing it as ‘‘all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick.’’ The argument behind Yeats’s dismissal is worth noting. What it seems to imply is that elegies, at least those in the classical and English tradition with which Owen identifies his work, must transcend melancholic lament to achieve consolation. As many critics have noted, however, Owen’s poems seem to o√er little such promise; indeed, his preface explicitly warns us that the poems to follow are ‘‘in no sense consolatory.’’ 4 5 R Even readers who recognize a place for the anti-elegiac within the genre’s boundaries have found another significant problem with Owen’s verse. The contemporary critic Jahan Ramazani offers a nuanced reading of Owen’s work that recognizes his place as a generic innovator of the modern elegy. Yet Ramazani, too, levies a charge against Owen – and all war elegists – that, if more oblique, shares a tangential connection with Yeats’s blunt criticism . For Ramazani, the fundamental problem with war elegies is not one of poetic authenticity so much as of empathic resonance and universality. According to Ramazani, war elegies highlight the central obstacle with which all elegies must contend: namely, that they ‘‘are irreducibly occasional forms of poetry.’’ Ramazani’s objection could, I think, be developed further, since the occasional status of such poetry is only half of the problem. No less significant than the inherent irregularity of the genre is its transient a√ective resonance. Owen’s poems may preclude consolation, but they do arouse pity, which he takes to be his rightful subject. The contrast between these two sentiments is an important one for Owen in that consolation implies a permanence and stability that pity can never attain. And yet, I will argue that pity’s transience in time pales in significance before another limitation: its inability to survive without attenuation beyond the limits of an exclusive community of mourners, one predicated on the firsthand experience of combat . In this community, the wounds of war that these elegies attempt to dress are neither metaphorical nor transient. In very di√erent ways, then, both Yeats and Ramazani have implicitly recognized the war elegy’s problematic claim to exceptionalism – that war (more specifically, the direct and unmediated firsthand experience of combat) represents a qualitatively distinct realm of human experience, the full knowledge of which is accessible only to a few. It is this notion of the unbridged epistemological gulf that exists in the highly fraught relationship between the combatant war elegist and his civilian audience that I wish to investigate. This distance exists to some degree in all elegies and, one might even say, in all works of lyric poetry. Whether we conceive of the lyric poem as the dramatic monologue of a fictive speaker or as a patched-together collection of speech acts frustrating all attempts to perceive a unified speaking persona, all poems exist in a social 4 6 K E L L E...