Slideshare for Wilfred Owen -- this is intended as a revision aide, not a knowledge filler.
Homework: Test yourself -- can you convincingly present this powerpoint?
Homework: Test yourself -- can you convincingly present this powerpoint?
Struggling with some 'big ideas' other than 'war is hell'?
Try these on for size...
(Thanks to Mrs Kelsey for this).
WILFRED OWEN – STRUCTURAL AND OTHER CONCEPTS –
excerpts from ‘The Great War, History and the English Lyric.’ By Edna Longley
War poetry became a mass medium in WW1 - ‘a hurricane of poetry’ Wipers Times - poetry allows for rapid response and Owen’s symbolic and mnemonic force reaches where prose cannot touch.
Try these on for size...
(Thanks to Mrs Kelsey for this).
WILFRED OWEN – STRUCTURAL AND OTHER CONCEPTS –
excerpts from ‘The Great War, History and the English Lyric.’ By Edna Longley
War poetry became a mass medium in WW1 - ‘a hurricane of poetry’ Wipers Times - poetry allows for rapid response and Owen’s symbolic and mnemonic force reaches where prose cannot touch.
- What is interesting for us is
the encounter between form and history – the changes and development in the
English Lyric, the sonnet and the elegy met with the crisis of WW1.
- The fact that the army relied
on new recruits infused it with England’s intellectual life and this
accelerated the war’s epistemological shock to what Yeats calls “established
things”, to ‘metaphysical systems, ideas of history, assumptions about poetic
means and ends.’
- Poets asked HOW forms could
negotiate historical crisis – became the muse of poetry
- Owen framed his mission ‘I came
out to help these boys – directly by leading them, indirectly by watching their
suffering so I may speak of them as a pleader does. Works with lyric on fictive
self . ‘I’.
- The English Lyric also became
infused with death and prophetic – Owen uses imagery of Christ and suffering -
infused with Anglican traditional symbols. Owen remained ‘attuned to the music,
stories and splendid language that helped shape his childhood.’ Hibberd.
- Sonnet form is touchstone for
English poetry – in which small things can say large and a ‘knock out blow’ in
last 2 lines. Owen absorbed these technical shock tactics. Parable of Old Man
treats the story of Abraham and Isaac as an irregularly rhymed “found” sonnet
in which son is rhymed with itself. Then a fully rhymed couplet changes the
biblical ending. Owen’s Dulce is a transgressive double sonnet whose structural
deviations set up the famous climax with its brilliant dissyllabic rhyme and
short last line.
- The counter blasting war sonnet
inwardly complicates the construction of memory and past and present pain.
- Intertextuality – Owen
regularly connects tunnelled dugouts to the underworld of Virgil, Dante and
Homer and quotes or uses Keatsian senusual imagery in connecting man with
nature. Insensibility revises ‘Shelley’s defence of poetry’. (Imagination is
associated with compassion; lack of with moral dullness). Exposure’s merciless
winter is reminiscent of Keats’ La Belle Dame and Eve of St Agnes.
- War poetry did become direct
intervention in the propaganda field often displaying ambivalence. Adrian
Caesar finds Owen’s poetry to be ambivalent and not consistently pacifist.
Attitudes to violence, voyeurism, fascination with war as a material, elitist
pride in the poet’s special ability to suffer, equation of the poet with
Christ…
- For Owen Armageddon was no cliché – his war poems take place on a
cosmic stage between heaven and earth, heaven and hell, body and soul, life and
death. ‘By his dead smile I knew we stood
in hell’ – Owen adapts structures of prayer, psalm, allegory, litany, in order to challenge the ‘futility’ of
religious structures.