World War I is considered a writer’s war on account of the many journals, poems, novels and memoirs that it prompted; English poet Wilfred Owen was one of those war writers.  Owen wrote poetry before his enlistment in the Army in 1915 (Hibberd 55), but his poetry is often interpreted by scholars as having matured only through his experience in the war: “The best poems…derive directly from the war, and the focus of the poetry comes from the writer’s working within the dire limitations of experience” (Silkin xxv).  The war revealed the horrors of trench warfare and chemical weaponry, and becoming a soldier gave rise to Owen’s theme as stated in his preface: “The pity of war” (Owen, Wilfred. “The Collected…” 31).  Until 1918 when he was killed in action, Owen’s poetry worked to expose and speak out against the horror of war.  His poetic career gave readers an opportunity to imagine life on the front lines, an opportunity that, in spite of its unpleasantness, Owen demanded readers take. This theme of imagination (as painful and in regards to its complex relationship to pain) is a striking thread in Owen’s work.  The absence of a soldier’s imagination during war, Owen’s disciplined and painful enactment of imagination as evidenced by his wartime poems, and his insistence on the transfer of imaginative sensation from the poet to the reader set imagination at the very crux of Owen’s philosophy and writing.  Owen’s techniques for inducing sympathy include the use of contradiction, descriptive imagery, and a blend of expressions or enactments of compassion and anger. Furthermore, imagination operating as a vessel for sympathy is the fulcrum of Owen’s poetry and arguably the poet’s greatest achievement in establishing a moral (i.e. anti-war) readership. 

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In order to establish imagination as the central force of connection and understanding between human beings, consider the first party in the linguistic transaction: the wartime poet himself.  The poet as the primary agent in this sympathetic connection must imagine his verse and narrative situation onto a page, and the reader (the secondary agent) must imagine himself as an actor within it.  It is no mistake that imagining another’s pain to a level of complete understanding is a nearly impossible task when many writers find that the language available to sculpt and retell the experience of World War I was inadequate in itself: “Whatever the cause, the presumed inadequacy of language itself to convey the facts about trench warfare is one of the motifs of all who wrote about the war” (Fussell 85).  This inadequacy of language becomes a trope for writers of painful experiences.  Reading the language, though, is the very thing that prompts a reader to imagine. 

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It is as though because of this inadequacy of language, readers are already disadvantaged from arriving at the sympathy the poems are intended to provoke.  This is by no means the fault of the poet, who after surviving a gruesome war seems to implode in the absence of sufficient communicative materials.  Indeed, as Percy Shelley argued in his “Defense of Poetry,” this collapse of the imagination during war is a core effect of corruption: “For the end of social corruption is to destroy all sensibility to pleasure; and, therefore, it is corruption. It begins at the imagination and the intellect as at the core, and distributes itself thence as a paralyzing venom, through the affections into the very appetites, until all become a torpid mass in which hardly sense survives” (Shelley 601). Here Shelley suggests that, in evil times of social corruption – a category under which war surely falls – the very mind of the human in pain undergoes a deconstruction, until everything – perhaps even one’s primary sensory capabilities – disappears.  All that remains in the absence of thought, therefore, is body and instinct, the fight for survival. 

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Elaine Scarry seems to agree on this point; she writes in her book The Body in Pain that, when experiencing pain, “…the created world of thought and feeling, all the psychological and mental content that constitutes both one’s self and one’s world, and that gives rise to and is in turn made possible by language, ceases to exist” (Scarry 30).  The point of this argument is to acknowledge that in writing (and therefore imagining) the experience of a pain once felt – and perhaps still being felt – the author’s imaginative power has been impaired by the very experience he wishes to convey; for it was during the painful wartime experience that the subject’s psychological understanding of self and experience was put on hold.  She also suggests that the writer’s relation to language is impaired; for the writer in pain, language loses its transparency and its innocence, becoming yet another obstacle to overcome.

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This phenomenon is demonstrated in one of Owen’s most haunting poems, “Insensibility.”  In the poem, the narrator (presumably Owen) remarks the numbness felt by soldiers.  The second stanza reads: “And some cease feeling / Even themselves or for themselves. / Dullness best solves / The tease and doubt of shelling, / And Chance’s strange arithmetic / Comes simpler than the reckoning of their shilling” (Owen 55).  Owen’s sentiments in this stanza seem to echo those expressed by Shelley and Scarry – that bodies in pain lose sensation.  It is an effect of war and trauma due to the impact on the body and the body’s instinctual survival response; Owen implies in his verse that this loss of sensation can be a relief, even a solution, to wartime experience.  Owen writes: “Happy are those who lose imagination: / They have enough to carry with ammunition” (Owen 55), again suggesting imagination is something burdensome in the heat of battle, something that, for the sake of survival, is better off nonexistent since imagination invites sympathy with others, which is unsustainable when one’s own existence is threatened.  However, the poet chooses the word “lose” to indicate this suspension of imagination, insinuating that the loss was not necessarily a choice but an effect of the war; without the weight of imagination on their backs, the soldiers can fill the space with more ammunition.

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However, Owen’s poetry is evidence enough that the post-war imagination can be a compensatory tool.  Indeed, the inadequacy of language described by many war poets makes necessary the enactment of the poet’s imagination for the sake of more effective communication. Take, for example, Owen’s poem “The Show,” one of the more horrifying in his collection.  The narrative situation of “The Show” includes Owen’s soul risen above the earth with some personified version of Death, watching a battle from above.  Yet it isn’t just a battle Owen witnesses; he sees caterpillars, perhaps a line of soldiers: “It seemed they pushed themselves to be as plugs / Of ditches, where they writhed and shriveled, killed.” He sees creatures: “Those that were gray, of more abundant spawns, / Ramped on the rest and ate them and were eaten.” He even sees himself at the very end, the point where he realizes he’s been dead all this time, and that his body is that of a worm:

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And Death fell with me, like a deepening moan.

And He, picking a manner of worm, which half had hid

Its bruises in the earth, but crawled no further,

Showed me its feet, the feet of many men,

And the fresh-severed head of it, my head (Owen 35).

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Owen’s layers of metaphor demonstrate the poet’s imaginative prowess; perhaps the function here of this figurative language is its displacement of the events being described in the poem from the events that occurred in Owen’s life.  In other words, in “The Show” he imagines himself looking down from above rather than bruised on the ground in the midst of the battle.  He describes insects and creatures instead of soldiers. He is one of them, a worm; they are disgusting, shriveling dead bodies of insects and he a squashed, severed worm.  In one gruesome metaphor Owen instills his disgust for the war, his disdain for himself as a participant of war, and his hatred for the world, which he describes as being filled with “great pocks,” “scabs of plaques,” and “Round myriad warts” (Owen 35).  And all the while, this gruesome metaphor is underscored by the reader’s recognition from the beginning that he is dead, that those are men, and that this is war; guilt resonates with the reader who cannot help but wince at the description of the smell, “As out of mouths, or deep wounds deepening” (Owen 35). These are Owen’s accomplishments of imagination at work, the single most important force for conveying the horror of a war that attempts to eliminate language.

           

However, the poet’s contributions to this exchange of understanding through poetry is only one half of the battle; the reader’s imaginative responsibilities, the link between imagination and sympathy and the overall importance of pity in a reader’s emotional reaction will be the foci through the remainder of this essay.  Owen’s take on the reader’s responsibility is hinted at in his preface, which asks readers to make an attempt at understanding, to slow down and to sympathize.  Owen is famous for his preface to his collection of war poems which translates into a mission statement of sorts:

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Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.

My subject is War, and the pity of War.

The Poetry is in the pity (Owen 31).

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From the outset of his collection, Owen’s tone seems to be distrustful; the explicit indication of Owen’s motives found in the preface indicates his unwillingness to leave the poetry itself to the reader’s translation.  The high stakes of Owen’s endeavor – to have civilians on the home front understand and sympathize with those fighting the war – is potentially what gives rise to Owen’s felt need to minimize the space for misunderstanding to take place.  Through the language of the preface, Owen tells readers exactly how he wants his poetry to be read.  His tone is that of a poet who knows all too well that appealing to a potentially ignorant readership is difficult to do well, and by no fault of his own.  Owen's endeavor is to write poetry that does not think of itself as poetry; instead of writing “poetry of war,” a phrase that suggests poetry as a pleasing byproduct of his experience, Owen writes war itself.  Indeed, writing the pity of war was a lofty endeavor, and one that was not frequently undertaken by many other poets of his time, for “as [other poets] wrote their historically oriented laments or elegies for those fallen in wars, they sought to comfort and inspire readers by placing the deaths and war itself in the context of sacrifice for a significant cause.  But Owen’s message for his generation, he said, must be one of warning rather than of consolation” (“Wilfred Owen” n.p.).  The poems, therefore, promise not to comfort or to justify; Owen promises to expose, as in his poem “Exposure,” rich with violent imagery, wherein soldiers’ hands shrivel and foreheads pucker in the deadly air streaked with flying bullets (Owen 63).  Owen promises to invoke pity, hardly the most pleasant emotion to promise a reader, but a necessary function if his poems stand a chance at making readers understand the horror of war.

           

Part of the unpleasantness of feeling pity is its alignment with sympathy.  “In general, pity is a kind of spectator sorrow” (Kimball 306) in which we feel for others.  By engaging with sympathy, one makes the other’s pain his own, a process which forges an emotional connection born from some level of understanding and imagining the other’s experience.  Aristotle proposed an interpretation of pity in his essay “On Rhetoric,” which reads, “…we pity those who are like us in age, character, disposition, social standing, or birth; for in all these cases it appears more likely that the same misfortune may befall us also. Here too we have to remember the general principle that what we fear for ourselves excites our pity when it happens to others” (Aristotle 229).  Owen’s poetry seems to coordinate with Aristotle’s interpretation of pity; the poet’s language and style are intended to excite a reader’s pity by appealing to pain and fear.  However, Owen seems one step ahead of the game: Aristotle’s argument suggests that readers will feel pity due to the likelihood that another’s misfortune will befall them, too.  Yet the poet, by enacting a reader’s imagination in the description of a painful and horrific experience has, in a smaller sense, already made the reader experience the misfortune. This is why Owen’s major achievement in many of his poems is his mastery of language, his ability to somehow find a way to represent a sliver of his wartime experience in the poetry itself: it makes the reader cringe and cry and hurt and pity.

           

Owen’s recognition of this connection between imagination and pity becomes evident in his poem “Insensibility.”  In the first stanza, Owen writes, “Happy are men…Whom no compassion fleers” while the third stanza reads, “Happy are these who lose imagination” (Owen 55).  The parallel structure of the two sentences suggests a sameness or at the very least a similarity in their objects, compassion and imagination.  Furthermore, Owen’s angry admittance that those who lack compassion are happy resonates with the earlier argument that Owen is fully aware of pity as an unpleasant but necessary feeling to invoke in his readers.  The anger bubbling within the narrator’s tone in “Insensibility” also implies a responsibility on the part of the reader to be compassionate and sympathetic.  The poet’s anger is available in both the tone and the style by which he writes; Owen’s enactment of harsh consonant sounds in “Insensibility” is an example of how the emotion in Owen’s poetry is mirrored by his linguistic decisions. For example, the first stanza of “Insensibility” sees an overwhelming number of “F” sounds:

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The front line withers.

But they are troops who fade, not flowers,

For poets’ tearful fooling.

Men, gaps for filling:

Losses, who might have fought

Longer; but no one bothers (Owen 55).  

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The effect of these harsh consonant sounds is a musical anger when read aloud; the last line of the stanza, “but no one bothers,” free from the F sounds that plague the rest of the language, incorporates a softer B sound to initiate a compassionate tone that intermixes with the anger throughout the poem.  Anger is a useful rhetorical strategy for Owen in this poem; the poet not only invites readers to feel the pity but demands it of them as their human duty.  These lines also speak to Owen’s rhetorical goal of writing war rather than poetry; he’s uninterested in the usual poetic pursuits about nature and beauty and insists upon terror, disgust, and pain as a necessary subject.  Readers are meant to feel guilt should they dare to turn their backs on Owen’s words; yet “Insensibility” as a whole achieves a spectacular balance between this seething anger and a melancholy compassion on the part of the narrator.  “Insensibility” may also pertain to the state of being dead: the dead are no longer able to experience sensation.  Owen’s use of the word “insensibility” functions as a harsh accusation which compares the dead to the unfeeling living.  “In setting the anger against the compassion he limits the compassion so as to ensure that it neither indulges in sentimentality nor luxuriates in itself as a way of emulsifying guilt” (Silkin 57).  Owen writes beautiful, compassionate verse for his fellow soldiers: “Their spirit drags no pack / Their old wounds, save with cold, can not more ache” (Owen 55).  His sympathy with them paired with his anger toward those spectators who feel no sympathy is a haunting combination; Owen simultaneously scolds the unsympathetic reader and demonstrates what it means to participate in the pity of war.

           

Perhaps the most powerful device Owen uses to evoke feelings of pity in his readers is his vivid, unforgiving imagery.  There is hardly a better way to appeal to another’s imagination than to appeal to his senses; the primary human senses are the very things upon which imagination rests.  The default when asked to imagine a scenario and describe it to another person, for example, is to appeal to these senses, to describe what the air tastes like, what the environment looks like, what the weather feels like.  These senses are fundamental to the enactment of imagination, which is what makes Owen’s poem “Exposure” hugely successful in making the reader imagine the pain and feel the pity.  Owen writes, “we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire,” “the flickering gunnery rumbles,” “flights of bullets streak the silence.” He describes “air that shudders black with snow” and “sunk fires, glazed / With crusted dark-red jewels” (Owen 63).  These examples – the first three being examples of touch, and the others of sight – are only a few of the many that pepper the poem and create a vivid detail of Owen’s encounter with war.  An interesting note upon reading “Exposure” and others of Owen’s works is the lack of touch sensation present in the language; there are a few examples, but none so compelling as the presence of visual and auditory detail in the poems. 

 

According to Scarry, “It is because vision and hearing are, under ordinary conditions, so exclusively bound up with their object rather than their bodily location that they are the senses most frequently invoked by poets as the sensory analogues for the imagination” (Scarry 165).  This resonates with the inadequacy of language in describing experiences of pain to others; perhaps Owen chooses to invoke other senses in order to somewhat dodge this inadequacy and, in a way, use the circumlocution of describing sight and sound in order to allow readers to imagine for themselves the felt experience.  By invoking vision and hearing rather than touch, Scarry argues that poets are able to separate themselves from the bodily experience, arguably a necessary separation when imagining (i.e. re-living) a painful experience for the sake of communicating it to others.

 

One of Owen’s poems in particular, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” very beautifully hints at this suspension of feeling and numbness that occurs during moments of acute pain.  He writes:

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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 (Owen 24).

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This passage from the first stanza of “Dulce et Decorum Est” is particularly interesting in that it recounts an experience of desensitization during the war including lameness, blindness and deafness.  Yet Owen makes use of another technique – contradiction – to make apparent the contrast between “normal” sensation and sensation under stressful conditions: although the men are lame, Owen writes that they “marched” and “limped on;” although they are blind, Owen recognizes they are “blood-shod;” and although they are deaf, the poet can somehow now, after the fact of the battle, recall the “hoots of gas-shells dropping.” This contradiction – using imagery to describe blindness and auditory description to reveal deafness – forces readers to attempt imagining and highlights the impossibility of imagining deafness and blindness when the act relies so heavily upon the faculties of vision and hearing.  Therefore, Owen uses sensations the reader can understand, not having experience the stresses of war for themselves.  The poet, having been blind and deaf, imagines his experience and reinterprets it for the reader.  The reader’s responsibility, then, is to appreciate the impossibility of knowing what deafness sounds like and what blindness looks like; the reader’s responsibility is to recognize the inherent contradiction, which invokes pity where imagery cannot.

           

Therefore, “Dulce et Decorum Est” features the same language of sight and sound as present elsewhere in Owen’s poetry and is virtually absent of language relating the felt experience of war. The final stanza of the poem is one that is particularly engaging and horrifying in terms of its visual and auditory description; it is the stanza in which the narrator calls out the reader – “you” – for the first time:

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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 (Owen 24).

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Owen writes “If you could hear” and “If…you too could pace…And watch,” to again make clear his frustrations in attempting to share an experience with an inadequate language.  The poet implies that it is impossible for the reader to watch and hear these things while simultaneously describing them in such a way that forces the reader to imagine that he can see and hear what is being described.  In the same passage as the poet states the shared experience is impossible, he is sharing an experience through language meant to invoke the reader’s senses and imagine the experience, pity the soldier.  Owen transports the reader with his refined, horrifying imagery and sound.  It is a painful poem to read, yet doubtlessly more painful for the poet to write, especially judging by the mixture of anger and compassion coupled with the harsh irony of the words “My friend.” The final line of the poem when translated from the Latin reads: “It is sweet and fitting (proper) to die for one’s country” (Silkin 25), revealing again the rhetorical mission of Owen’s collection: to make readers feel the pity of war, to warn against war, and to reveal the evil deception of the slogans that entice men to their meaningless death.  In other words, if one could see and hear, one would know that it is not fitting to die for one’s country; and through the poem one is meant to see and hear, and therefore be warned.

           

Living almost a century after Owen’s poems were written, today’s readers will recognize that Owen did not change the world with his stance against war.  What was known as the Great War during Owen’s time is now merely recognized as World War I; it did not end up being “the war to end all wars.”  But in spite of today’s Western sociopolitical climate remaining relatively similar to the ideals of patriotism from Owen’s day, Owen’s collection is no less accomplished.  Pity via imagination was and is the mission, a worthy goal in itself.  In Shelley’s “Defense of Poetry” he writes, “A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight…” (Shelley 596).  Shelley’s analysis argues for the importance of poetry in cultivating imagination, imagination as a means toward sympathy, and sympathy as a measure and instrument of great and necessary morality.  In accordance with this argument, without ever inciting dramatic political change from his poetry, Owen’s success in appealing to the imagination is a success in itself; through the techniques of his poetry and the elegance of his style, Owen’s poems as a force for pity have already won.

           

The prize for the poet, then, must be what Scarry refers to as the lessening of sickness and pain and the “worldly self-extension” of the writer:  “…in acknowledging and expressing another person’s pain…one human being who is well and free willingly turns himself into an image of the other’s psychic or sentient claims, an image existing in the space outside the sufferer’s body, projected out into the world and held there intact by that person’s powers until the sufferer himself regains his own powers of self-extension. By holding that world in place, or by giving the pain a place in the world, sympathy lessens the power of sickness and pain, counteracts the force with which a person in great pain or sickness can be swallowed alive by the body” (Scarry 50).  This must be why writers commonly lament the inadequacy of language to capture their experience: the inability to share something painful is a tragedy in itself.  The war that pummeled soldiers, deafened them and killed them surpassed the ability of language, so that even after its end the effects reverberate.  As was discussed earlier, however, Owen found ways to breach the barrier of language by describing pain through imagery, by embracing the contradictions and making them evident to share his frustration, and by achieving a tension between compassion and anger to stun the reader.  It’s unclear as to whether this poetic endeavor helped to lessen Owen’s pain or the pain of others like him, but his need to write about the war in letters and poems and his need to write war rather than poetry indicates the existence of something rather cathartic in, after fighting for his country, having his country hear him – really hear him.

           

And if the readers refuse to hear? Owen has something to say about that, as well. From “Insensibility,” the final stanza:

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But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns,

That they should be as stones.

Wretched are they, and mean

With paucity that never was simplicity.

By choice they made themselves immune

To pity and whatever moans in man

Before the last sea and the hapless stars;

Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;

Whatever shares                                              

The eternal reciprocity of tears (Owen 56)

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“Happy are they,” writes Owen about the citizenry who refuse to know war by closing their doors to those who did.  It is easier not to read Owen’s poems and feel the sorrow of pity and sympathy, and much easier to escape having to imagine; Owen indicates in the stanza above that to open oneself up to the possibility of imagination and sympathy is a choice.  However, the poet knows, like Shelley, that the tasks of imagining and sympathizing are the ingredients for morality, and he writes war with the intention of appealing to that morality.  “Happy are they,” writes Owen in the first stanza; “But cursed,” he writes in the last.

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