Topic: Why would W.B.Yates have Wilfred Owen barred from the halls of great poets?
 
Thesis Statement: Wilfred Owen managed to develop a great body of unique poetry under extremely fraught and inhuman conditions before his tragic death, only to be maligned and regulated to second-rate status as a poet by W.B Yates.
 
What W.B. Yates had to say about Wilfred Owen
 
Who was Wilfred Owen
 
What Owen had already said back
 
Who was Y.B Yates
 
More on Owen and his poems
 
More on Yates and his poems
 
Conclusions
 
                       “Owen & Yates”

    Wilfred Owen managed to develop a great body of unique poetry under extremely
fraught and inhuman conditions before his tragic and early death, only to be maligned and regulated to second-rate status as a poet by W.B. Yeats. As editor of The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936) Yeats refused to include any of the war poems into the book saying that, “passive suffering is not a theme for poems” (Johnston 17). When pressed on this by his peers, in a specific case made for Owen’s benefit, Yates spouted in defense

 When I excluded Wilfred Owen, whom I consider unworthy of the poets corner of a country newspaper, I did not know I was excluding a revered sandwich-board Man of the revolution & that some body has put his worst & most famous poem in a glass-case in the British Museum – however if I had known it I would have excluded him just the same. He is all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick (look at the selection in Faber’s Anthology – he calls poets ‘bards’, a girl a ‘maid’, & talks about ‘Titanic wars’). There is every excuse for him but none for those who like him (Johnston 208).

    These are rather strong words to use to condemn a dead man with and it is with little wonder then that so few today are familiar with Wilfred Owen’s work. Yeats’s epitaph for Owen also provides an interesting canvas from which one might compare and contrast the work of the two artists, for though the venerable Yeats drove a stake into Owen’s long dead body, he did not completely silence the voices that would still consider Owen’s work as being among the best the English had to offer in the 20th Century.  

    Wilfred Owen was born in Plas Wilmot, Oswestry, in Shorpshire, England on March 18, 1893. Born into a near well to do middle class family with strong religious convictions.  Owen garnered himself a fair education and was teaching as a tutor at the Berlitz School of Languages in Bordeaux, France by the age of twenty. Already having developed an affinity for poetry at age sixteen, Owen was latter writing some minor poems of undistinguished merit, however he was experimenting with assonance and a form of half rhyme called para-rhyme, which marked him as having serious endeavor as a poet.   Para-rhyme being a rather disciplined and exacting method of incorporating incomplete rhyme into poetry involves the use of similar consonant sounds before and after unlike vowels, (braid / brood, leaves / lives for instance as opposed to half rhyme lives / staves, brood / mud) and Owen is credited with being the first English poet to incorporate it purposefully into poetry and with good effect with some of his latter more developed poems.  In 1914 when Owen was twenty-one and still in France, war had broke out on the continent and though with possible pacifist leanings he like so many other good young Englishmen soon found himself caught up in the fervor of war and so returned back to England and enlisted in the Artists Rifles Regiment late in 1915 and was commissioned an officer in the Manchester Regiment by 1916. By December of that year he was back on the continent attached to the Lancashire Fusiliers on the western front. (Owen ix-x) It was there that Owens poetry began to mature (Johnston 155); there in an environment of minefields, trenches, and barbed wire, where men grouped together in brigades and divisions, were pitted against other men similarly grouped, where all of sciences endeavors were applied to massing the fires of the machine gun and artillery so as to exact the most casualty producing effect ever known to the history of man at that time. 

    Owen would not see another two years pass. Twenty-three months latter, on November 4th 1918, Owen was killed while trying to get his men across the Sambre Canal. His death came seven days before the Armistice was declared. His mother received the letter as the bells celebrated on Armistice Day (Rushe np online). But in those short twenty-three months Wilfred Owen developed a body of poetry that resounded in truth and begs even today for all to take heed.

    Ironically and as it perhaps should be, Owen seemed to have written for Yeats both his attack against himself as well as his own powerful counter arguments back to Yeats in the body of his poems and letters. Retrieved from his effects was a draft of his preface to his yet unpublished book of poems where he says,

This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, or anything about glory, honor, might, majesty, dominion or power, except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. (31 Owen).

In this preface is Owens’s argument that English poets had not yet earned the right to speak to real Englishmen. A powerful indictment that Yeats could not let stand, one in which he seems to have taken personnel offence too, yet a truth that remains embodied in the poems of Wilfred Owen.

    In his poem “Greater Love”, one can see the power of this indictment as he reaches out for justice and tramples down romantic poetry with lines like; “Red lips are not so red / As the stained stones kissed by the English dead” or “O Love, your eyes lose lure / When I behold eyes blinded in my stead!”. (42 Owen) In “Greater Love”, Owen takes delicate charmed verse and contrasts it to the lives of men thrust into the horrors of war where they’ve not to do but band and bond themselves together in hopes of survival in the most trying and deadliest of times. The resulting effect in these lines seem to strip romanticism of its lure, 

           Heart, you were never hot
              Nor large, nor full like hearts made great with shot;
           And though your hand be pale,
           Paler are all which trail
           Your cross through flame and hail;
             Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not. (41 Owen)

for how can even hearts broken in love compare to deaths dealt so viciously to men that would only wish they could love too. He gives us truly pitiful words laid out in a solid stop and start rhythm that twist and grind at the readers heart as he takes love to task in such a way that one would have to step out onto the battlefield to prove a love stronger. But Owen did not do it because he hates love, or the words of love; rather he did it because he hated war and loved too much the brothers he had banded with while he could do not but to watch them die.

    The venerable Y.B Yeats, born in Dublin in 1865, was also born of high middle class parentage, perhaps a class higher for his father was a retired barrister turned artist, and both parents had a somewhat fashionable lineage from times past. Y.B Yeats turned out his first printed volume of verse at age twenty-one, his second the year Owen was born, and would continue to write poetry as well as plays well up to his death in 1939. Afforded leisure in life, Yeats lived a bohemian life style marked only by his own successes and whichever troubles he wished to visit upon his own self.  A serious poet from the beginning he fashioned much of his early and middle poetry out of old Celtic mythologies that helped raise the Irish national identity (Foster 1-3) as he readily alludes to in his poem “A Coat” where he says,

I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat; (Abrams 2100).

Looking back one can say much of Yeats’s poetry was contrived as compared to the poetry of Owen that had to be forged in the furnace of a real hell. 

      The blood and dirt that Yeats complained about in Owens’s poems were not something Owen could easily eliminate but was rather much a part of his environment One gets the idea that Yeats, like others, would much more prefer a poem to speak to something higher and more meaningful in life than of shabby worn soldiers and bloodied knives. If it was to be a war poem one gets the sense that lofty ideals should be found wrestling for supremacy in the heavens while magnificent armies clashed below in some far off dream place, like “on a darkling plain / where ignorant armies clashed by night” (Abrams 1867).  Indeed too Owens’s anti war messages came from a rather narrow view of the war and seemed almost not in abeyance with the aims of England. He was not afforded the bird’s eye view of Armies, Corps, and Divisions, arrayed one against the other as they would thrust, parry, and strike for global domination. Indeed the bigger picture of war, the extremity and necessity of its purpose quickly lost itself to the individual soldier as opposing formations moved and massed against each other and then dispersed or sought cover in an ever continuing dance to close with and destroy the enemy while utilizing the most effective means possible to bring havoc and strike terror into each others force. His view was up front and personnel, anti-septic he could not be but it’s a wonder when he’s accused of being all blood and guts when instead of raising to the lofty heights of high ideal he instead reaches up and grabs those lofty ideals and brings them down into the trenches with him with poems like: “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young” where he tells the familiar bible story of Abram and Isaac where Abram is to slay Isaac as a sacrifice to god, till an angel appears and tells Abram ‘God now trusts in his obedience and now allows a ram to be sacrificed in its place’, however in Owens’s poem he puts a macabre turn at the end of story when the angel says,

           Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one. (Owen 42)

He does it differently in his poem “Insensibility” where he gives an entire prayer a twist with such lines like:

Happy are men who yet before they are killed
Can let their veins run cold.
Whom no compassion fleers
Or makes their feet
Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers.
…………………………………………….

Happy are these who lose imagination:
They have enough to carry with ammunition.
Their spirit drags no pack,
Their old wounds, save with cold, can not more ache. (Ownen 37)

    In several of his poems Owen used religion to rather good effect but those weren’t the only cherished thoughts he grabbed from up high and brought down low to mud sucking trenches to let folks back home have a bit of the truth with their stew and ale. In “Arms and the Boy” he takes the time-honored tradition of instructions for raising a son and gives it new rites as can be seen by these lines:

                       Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade
                       How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood;
                       Blue with all malice, like a madman’s flesh;
                       And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh.

                       Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet-leads
                       Which long to nuzzle in the hearts of lads, (Owen 43)
                       
In “Futility” it’s nature that he drags down to help bring the boys home in a rather gentle, sad, and futile poem:

Move him into the sun-
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know. (Owen 58)

     Be it the humor Owen employs in “The Letter”, or the dreams that had run tragically to a stop in the “The Strange Soldier”, or the guilt he loads the reader with in “A Terre”, “Disabled”, or “Mental Cases”, he reaches out with each, as with most all his poems, and touches the readers sensibilities as he pleads compassionately for the common man, made soldier, who was then cast into the gnashing jaws of that industrial era’s war machine. Indeed the cumulative effect of his poems when read one after another grips the reader with an ever-increasing sense of realism and dread and one would be hard pressed not to pour their own pity back onto the pages read.

    Why Yeats’s would attack Owen seems strange if not cruel or careless when the “sucked sugar stick” in the poems of Owen hardly had an effect on his compassioned plea for mercy.  Owen himself had consciously eliminated much of it as he redrafted his poems to give them a broader outlook and appeal (Johnston 208). One could wonder what excuse Yeats had for retaining his “sucked sugar stick” given all the time he had to write it out. In “The Madness of King Groll” every verse ends with “They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, / the beach leaves old” (Yeats 16) in “The White Birds” its “I would that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam / of the sea!” (Yeats 41)  in “Her Vision in the Wood” its “I stared upon his blood-bedabbled breast” (Yeats 274). Indeed the subject of many of Yeats’s poems seems to be nothing more than “sucked sugar stick” as he built and wrote a good deal of his poems from illusion as he searched out supernatural wisdoms.

     As editor and poet laureate Yeats had the right to keep Owen from The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, however coupling that with what seemed an almost childish denouncement of Owen did little to serve him or protect English poetry. Now it is too easy to see that Yates’s beautiful poems were often contrived from legend and other sweet nothings where as the poems of Owen were and still are a truly pitiful cry from the past. Yates’s voice against Owen only served to beg the comparison and any who’d open the poems of Owen will readily see what true power a poet really can have.

                                               WORKS CITED

Foster R. F. W.B.Yeats, A Life I. The Apprentice Mage. Oxford, New York: Oxford                                                                                              University Press, 1997.

Johnston, John H. English Poetry of the First World War. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton Press, 1964.

Owen, Wilfred  The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. Ed. with introduction and notes by C. Day Lewis and with Memoir by Edmund Blunden. Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions, 1964.

Yeats, Willam Butler The Poems of W.B. Yeats  Ed. Richard J. Finneran New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1983.

Rushe, Harry “—the rest is silence. Lost Poets of the Great War” Emory University English Department http://www.cc.emory.edu/ENGLISH/LostPoets.html
http://www.cc.emory.edu/ENGLISH/LostPoets/Owen.html  Last Update April 97