Wilfred Owen’s poetry gives me something I need most in modern life: feeling. While his bleak message reminds me to avoid cynicism and keep the faith.
In Part 1 of Barbarian Poets, I described the Western Front of World War I as a blood-rusted wasteland where hungry machines devoured men by the millions. As soldiers faced incoming shells and murderous machine gun fire, they knew that any moment could be their last.
As a result, they searched for ways to add meaning and certainty to their perilous existence at the front. Many turned to religion (through prayer), nationalism (through duty), or love (through fellowship). So, if they died, they died knowing it was God’s plan, for their country, or maybe most of all, for the men fighting beside them. Adhering to these beliefs gave meaning to their role at the front.
But what if they rejected such beliefs? What if they thought that those who died in battle, died unnecessarily? Few chose to believe this because it was too painful to consider that you and all your friends (especially the dead ones) are nothing more than pawns in “the great game” of kings, empires, and commerce.
Yet, some could no longer lie to themselves. They could no longer accept cliches like “everything happens for a reason” or “he died for his country.” As they watched more and more men die horrifically around them in one suicidal attack after another, they lost faith in God and country. They became disillusioned. And soon, they began to write about it.
Scribbling in dirty notebooks amidst the mud of Flanders and the annihilation of the Somme, their words – written in verse and prose -- gave meaning to their dire existence. These were the Barbarian Poets of The First World War, reminding those back home, plus future generations yet born, that the men living in the trenches and dying in No Man’s Land were not “battalions” or “divisions,” they were men – individual, young, and hopeful men. And they mattered.
One of these scribblers was a British lieutenant named Wilfred Owen and boy did he matter. Because for me, and some other men I know, he still does.
Hail Britannia
Like most men who fought in this war, Owen was born in the nineteenth century, growing up with nineteenth-century sensibilities. Born in 1893, he (like most British officers of the war) grew up middle class and attended boarding schools, studying the curriculum of the day, which meant the classics, the natural sciences, and enough literature and poetry to keep one pontificating at social clubs for decades to come. Owen was groomed for a nineteenth-century world that blended club life and country homes with factories and global commerce. In many ways, his generation straddled the old world and the new.
Owen came of age as Great Britain reached its imperial, economic, and cultural climax on the world stage. Over the cobblestone streets of Oxford and Cambridge, jacketed students pedaled to lectures beneath vaulted halls where ramrod professors lectured about Tacitus, Shakespeare, and Darwin.
Through the halls of Parliament, whiskered MPs with pocket watches and raised eyebrows, preached the progressive ideas of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, while supporting the nation’s working class and the “common good.” They also championed public works projects and established Western-style governments for their colonies in Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas.
Oh, what a time it was to be British! Progress was on the march and Great Britain was leading the way. The twentieth century would be peaceful, prosperous, and above all, civilized.
Then the First World War killed it all, and nineteenth-century British optimism died in the trenches.
Following the war, a cynical cloud hung across Britain, a cloud that has never truly gone away. “It was the end of illusions,” wrote Paul Fussell in his masterpiece, The War and Modern Memory. “If there are smiles [left],” wrote the cultural critic Lytton Starchey, “they are sardonic.”
Wilfred Owen Reports for Duty
As old-world confidence crumbled on the Western Front, Wilfred Owen reported to the Somme region of Northern France just a few months after half a million British soldiers fell at the Battle of the Somme (see Part 1). He left civilization for a wasteland, and he would never fully return.
After four months of sustained combat, Owen began suffering from “shell shock” or what we’d call PTSD today. He spent the next few months at a mental hospital where he met fellow poet and veteran, Siegfried Sassoon. Like Sassoon, Owen soon became disillusioned with the war, seeing every casualty as a tragic waste. Despite his opposition to the war, he eventually (and voluntarily) returned to his unit at the front and earned the Military Cross for valor. Despite all his anti-war sentiments, Owen still felt a duty to be with his men.
While hospitalized and during his time at the front, Owen wrote dark and beautiful poetry about the war and the factory of death it had become. His words invited readers into the trenches to experience the mud, lice, rats, rain, and shivering cold, plus the nerve-addling terror of combat. Writing to his mother after four straight days at a forward dugout in No Man’s Land, he said, “I have suffered seventh hell. I have not been at the front. I have been in front of it.”
Harnessing his traumas, Owen’s poems tremble with heartbreak and loss.
Emerson once said of Montaigne, “Cut these words and they would bleed.” I feel that with Owen’s words: they spill with blood. Reading Owen will not cheer you up, but his poems will move you – and if you’re like me, they will move you to tears.
If you’re tired of feeling like a cog at work or a cyborg with your phone, then give yourself two minutes to read Dulce et Decorum est, Owen’s most famous poem of all. Doing so will make you FEEL. You will likely feel sad and vulnerable, but I promise you, above all, you will feel human.
Dulce et Decorum, est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
The translation (originally written by Horace to spur patriotic Romans): "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country."
When I read this, I feel Owen's exhaustion, his urgency to don a gas mask, and his utter hatred for war. He has no time for patriotic cliches or slogans that try to dignify war. Wilfred Owen wants people like you and me, people who live in comfort and security, to feel his anguish, and think twice before supporting the next unnecessary war, where teenage men will die horrifically with their boots on.
Anthem of a Doomed Youth
In Anthem of a Doomed Youth, Owen launches another assault on war. He describes the “monstrous guns,” “stuttering rifles,” and “wailing shells” that kill men like “cattle,” i.e. without feeling or remorse.
In Doomed Youth, Owen has no aim but sorrow. He seeks no cause to justify the dead. He seeks no solace from God through “prayer” or “choirs.” To Owen, these men died randomly, tragically, and perhaps worst of all, for no good reason.
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
That last line… wow, that hits me hard. After these men are obliterated by wailing shells, all those they’ve left behind – their mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, wives, and children – call for them from the sad shires of England, knowing their beloved boy is never coming home.
Wake up! Owen is screaming to us all. Humanity is losing… the machines are winning… the bureaucracies are winning… the cliches are winning… the banality of evil has arrived.
Utterly pessimistic, but powerful and seismic, Owen wants us to be human… to feel, to think, to challenge authority. As for himself, I think he just wants to lament. All that’s left for this young man, raised on nineteenth century optimism, seems to be sadness.
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In the war’s final week, a week which had absolutely no effect on the outcome of the war, Wilfred Owen died in combat, joining those wasted men in his poems.
To make matters worse, his dear mother, whom he wrote often, received news of her son’s death just a few hours after she received news that the war had ended. There she stood, wailing in her sad shire for a son who would never return.
The Lost Generation
By the end of 1918, half of all Frenchmen aged 20 to 32 had been killed in action. For Germans in their early 20s, one in three died. In Britain, one in three households had a man killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. Then the Spanish influenza hit and things got even worse. The flu killed another 60 million people – mostly young adults due to the virus triggering an overresponse from healthy immune systems.
By the end of 1919, close to 100 million young adults (mostly men) died in a five-year span from war or sickness. Given that, it makes sense that most artists from that generation continued to express Owen’s message of disillusion.
In the years following the war, historian Joseph Loconte describes a “psychological gloom” hanging over most veterans. For artists (like the Barbarian Poets), “the cruelty and senselessness of the war… became the dominant motifs of [their] generation” – a generation Gertrude Stein called, “The Lost Generation.” Among the generation's disillusioned (or 'lost') were the 1920s Parisian set of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and more.
Weary, aimless, broken, burnt out, and despondent – their literature and poetry evoked it all. As Loconte writes, “concepts of decline and collapse, of sickness and death, inflected nearly every cultural endeavor: intellectual, artistic, literary, scientific, philosophical, and religious.”
Yet, sitting on the cultural sidelines during this boom in despondent literature were a few old-school cats who refused to throw in the towel. As the Lost Generation tacked left towards cynicism, these writers (also veterans of the war) tacked right towards earnestness and tradition. They, Loconte writes, were determined not to give the Lost Generation or “Wilfred Owen’s raging anthem against war… the final word.”
The Inklings
Wearing vests, tweed jackets, and wool trousers, a group of writers calling themselves “the Inklings” led a creative counter-revolution against the Parisian elite from their cloistered corridors at Oxford University. According to the book, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings, these mainly Christian professors “fashioned a new narrative of hope amid the ruins of war, industrialization, cultural disintegration, skepticism, and anomie.” They celebrated the virtues found in war like duty, courage, and redemption. They celebrated the wonders of Anglo-Saxon myths, legends, and heroes. And above all, they celebrated their own fellowship, meeting every Tuesday at a favorite Oxford pub for thirty years, where they enjoyed “beef, beer, and verbal battle.”
Amidst the swirl of tobacco smoke from his Briar pipe, stood J.R.R. Tolkien, the Inkling’s leading figure, along with his first mate, C.S. Lewis. Tolkien’s artistic mission, he declared, was to “rekindle an old light in the world,” to restore the prominence of tradition, custom, and the hero’s journey. He succeeded in his mission by writing a trilogy that remains, according to surveys in Britain, “the nation’s best-loved book.”
Spinning an epic yarn, inspired by medieval myth, Christian morality, and his own experiences on the Western Front, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings series has sold more than 150 million copies to date.
In Part 3, we’ll conclude our Barbarian Poets series on a positive note with J.R.R. Tolkien reminding every cynic or dispirited person out there that a flame still exists inside each of us. No matter how many wars, pandemics, or machines might try to defeat us, we each have that fire inside. Through quests involving vigor, wonder, and fellowship, Tolkien reminds us that the human spirit is still alive, and it’s up to each of us to keep our flame lit.
Till next time, Barbarians, keep your fire burning and keep the faith.
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