CLOSE READING: ‘My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.’

How form impacts persona and message in the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen

Photo by Elina Sazonova

Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen — the names of these two poets evoke, instantaneously, thoughts of the artistic heart that was moulded in the steel storm of the First World War, and, in the case of Owen, outlasted its creator’s experience of it. Owen and Sassoon had a well-known friendship, with Owen very much seeing Sassoon as a mentor. Yet although united in their experience of human-wrought horror and their creative outlet of poetry, they each had distinct approaches to using it as a means to process their experiences, particularly as pertains the way they utilised form. This analysis primarily focuses on Sassoon’s ‘The Hero’ and Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, but will also include discussion of Sassoon’s ‘The Dug Out’ as well as Owen’s ‘The Send-Off’ to formulate a more nuanced take on each poet’s use of form and how, through rhyme, metre, pronouns, and diction, the poets either close or widen the narrative distance. Through this it will become clear that form integrally serves the poetry of both poets, either through the persona in the interest of persuasion through emotional connection, pertinent to the waning Victorian tradition and used more by Sassoon, or through precise imagery and language in the interest of dissuasion through generating feelings of unease, pertinent to the emerging Modernist tradition and used more by Owen.

REVIEW: The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It by David Bell

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When does a war become total? David Bell answers that typological question by illustrating the first time, to his eyes, a war ever bore the social, philosophical, and practical hallmarks of a conflict that saw mass mobilisation, radicalised war aims, and blurred the civilian-soldier line – hallmarks that, arguably, best encapsulate total war as a concept. The central thesis of The First Total War is that the Napoleonic wars demonstrated a significant break in military culture from the limited style of warfare that followed the religious wars. Bell illustrates this well and suits his purpose with this volume, although his argument forfeits detailed evaluation of total war as a continuity of features.

In Bell’s argument, the chief arena of change is social and philosophical rather than technological, though he certainly highlights the distinction between infantrymen fighting pikes versus cannon. Within the first chapter, Bell highlights the lack of distinction between spheres of life in the officer corps, where the theatre of aristocracy is staged in equal parts at court and during the campaign. Here, war is a part of social identity and a bridge to intellectualism, crossed by figures like Lauzun, Marquis de Sade, and Napoleon. These figures show their faces throughout, such as in the chapter on the National Assembly debating warmaking powers, but the throughline of cultural transformation is less clear in the rest of the book, which shifts its focus to the atrocities and radicalisation of a revolutionary army sweeping across Europe. In a way, the somewhat ambling structure of the book reflects the decline of the aristoracy as the centre of the military story into just another level of the corps in an increasingly distinct military identity.