Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas:

Sixty Years After

Gilbert Allen
Furman University
Locksley Hall may not have much in common with the Great War, but
the allusion in my paper's title is not entirely pointless. It seemed a fairly
efficient way to suggest two things: first, that Wilfred Owen and Edward
Thomas, like the narrator of Tennyson's poem, are interesting figures located
at a special moment in time; and second, that despite the occasional
quaintness of their diction and ideas, their work has an oddly contemporary.
almost prophetic quality.
But first, a bit of background is in order. Wilfred Owen and Edward
Thomas are fairly prominent minor poets, although they are better known to
the general reading public (if there stilI is such a thing) in Britain than in the
United States. Both died in combat during World War I-Thomas in the
Battle of Arras in April 1917 and Owen while trying to cross the Sambre
Canal a week before the Armistice. Both men had published only a handful of
poems during their lifetimes, but achieved a posthumous fame fairly quickly.
Thomas' reputation was advanced by the efforts of Middleton Murry, the
young F.R. Leavis, and R.P. Eckert, his first biographer. Owen's work was
also praised by Murry, and it was published by his friend Siegfried Sassoon
and also by Edith Sitwell, the editor of Wheels (an important magazine that in
]9]9 included some of Owen's finest work).
Owen especiallywas influential upon the generation of British poets that
came of age during the late twenties and early thirties. W.H. Auden admired
and emulated both his social consciousness and his consonantal rhymes;
Stephen Spender (in his first book of literary criticism, The Destructive
Element) praised his compassion, although he grumbled somewhat over the
inadequacy of "pity" as an aesthetic principle; and Dylan Thomas regarded
him as a noble forebear, a fellow Welshman with an ardent Romanticism that
rivaled his own. Edward Thomas did not capture the imaginations of these
writers in quite the same way, although they did admire him as a fine lyric
poet, the last gasp of a rural England that was destroyed by the horrors of
industrialism and the Great War. In more recent years, however, Thomas'
work has had considerable influence upon British poets, most notably Philip
Larkin.
49

50

But Owen and Thomas seem peripheral to the modernist tradition-that

is, to the tradition of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, which is virulently antiRomantic and principally ironic. The reasons are clear. Both Thomas and
Owen were Romantic poets who did not excel in the ironic mode. One of the
most efficient ways, in fact, to describe Edward Thomas to a reader
unfamiliar with his work is to say that he is an English Robert Frost who
utterly lacks a sense of irony. (Thomas, of course, was Frost's best friend and
gave him his first favorable review.)Owen, on occasion, imitated the work of
his mentor Siegfried Sassoon, but this rough, strictly-cadenced satire was not
suited to his sensibility, and it was in any event far removed from the subtle,
omnidirectional irony of the young T.S. Eliot.
Now, let us consider some more recent events on this side of the Atlantic.
During the late fifties and early sixties, the modernist tradition began to seem
less attractive to American writers. The most obvious change in the work of
younger poets involved the devaluation of irony and the resulting decrease in
psychic distance between the poet and hispoem. Writers as different as James
Dickey, Allen Ginsberg, Galway Kinnell, James Wright, and the so-called
"confessionals" began to develop a new poetry that wasthe antithesis of ironic
detachment and imaginative sang froid. These poets held many different
political, moral, and aesthetic beliefs, but they were united in their sensethat a
poet should be less the self-conscious artificer and more the imaginative
adventurer. In other words, Romanticism was back in style, and feeling (as
opposed to thinking) was no longer a dirty word.
Two modes in American verse began to develop. Poets such as Dickey
and Kinnell seemed to produce a poetry of immersion-that is, a poetry
heavily dependent upon the writer's empathy with things, animals, or other
human beings. This empathy often entailed an extravagance in diction and
style that violated the principles of decorum that had governed the writing of
so-called "academic" verse in the modernist tradition. Poets such as James
Wright and the confessionals, on the other hand, developed a poetry of
introspection whose absolute honesty was often shocking.
But these modes, although fresh and interesting, were not wholly new.
They represent the opposite ends of the spectrum that is the Romantic
tradition. Certainly they were visible when wecompare the contemplations of
Wordsworth to the "negative capability" of Keats, and when we compare "In
Memoriam" or "Dover Beach" to Browning's dramatic monologues. One
basic way of classifying Romantics is to separate them into introspective
poets and empathic poets. And, one of the most fascinating things about
Edward Thomas and Wilfred Owen is that they are the last poets in the
tradition beginning with Wordsworth and Keats who can be "paired" in this
way. At the same time, however, they are part of the first generation of writers
to come to aesthetic maturity in a recognizably modern world. This peculiar
location in literary ~ory makes them of particular interest both to

51

contemporary poets who see their own work as an extension of the Romantic
tradition and to literary scholars who wish to understand this new
Romanticism in contemporary poetry more thoroughly.
This may sound like an extravagant claim on the behalf of two minor
poets, but their best work is extremely good, and some contemporary
American poets have learned a good deal from it. I would now like to outline
two specific instances in which this influence has occurred.
First, let us consider Edward Thomas and James Wright, both poets of
introspection. Here is the beginning of Thomas' "Rain":
Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
And now, the beginning of a poem written more than forty years later:
My name is James A. Wright, and I was born
Twenty-five miles from this infected grave,
In Martins Ferry, Ohio, where one slave
To Hazel-Atlas Glass became my father. I return
To dead Ohio, where I might lie buried,
Had I not run away before my time.
These passages are very close to one another, both stylistically and
thematically. The cadence of the pentameter linesand the simplicity of diction
are nearly identical. Each writer specializes in a stark, almost barren honesty
that paradoxically leads to new imaginative riches. Both Thomas and Wright
are consciously trying to revitalize the Wordsworthian tradition within the
context of a modern age that seems, at least on the surface of things, to be
utterly devoid of a "visionary gleam." Only truth and humility remain-what
Wright calls ''the pure clear word" spoken "in a flat voice." (Thomas, in a
poem entitled "Words," describes language in a similar way. English words
are somehow at once "Strange as the races/Of dead and unborn" and
"Familiar/To the eye/ As the dearest faces/That a man knows. . . .") Much
has been written about the influence of Edwin Arlington Robinson and
Robert Frost upon Wright's work, but Wright is really far closer in both style
and temperament to Thomas-the man whom he praised in one of his later
poems as "the only/Soldier in this century who was sane."
The resemblance between James Dickey and Wilfred Owen is not as
exact. Their temperaments are very nearly opposites. Although both often
write about positions of extremity in general and about war in particular,
Owen does so from a sense of social obligation, whereas Dickey focuses upon

52

53

such matters for reasons that I will call, for lack of a better term, more
personal. Nevertheless, a real resemblance exists between some of their
poems, and on occasion that resemblance is astonishing. Consider these lines
from the third stanza of Dickey's "Horses and Prisoners":
. . . my mind, like a fence on fire,
Went around those unknown men:
Those who tore from the red, light bones
The intensified meat of hunger
And then lay down open-eyed
In a raw, straining dream of new life.
The following lines, from Owen's poem "Insensibility," could almost be part
of the same work:
Having seen all things red,
Their eyes are rid
Of the hurt of the color of blood forever.
And terror's first constriction over,
Their hearts remain small-drawn.
The subject, the empathic tendency, the high Romantic rhetoric, the
elaborate figures of speech in a shocking context, and even the anapestic lilt
seem remarkably similar. (I must admit, however, that the anapests are
unusual for Owen.) Both these poets seem to produce their best work when
they focus their imaginations upon an object or person and speak through it
rather than merely about it.
Poets, of course, have not been the only ones interested in the work of
Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas in recent years. There has been a revival
of critical interest as well. New biographies of Thomas by WilliamCooke and
Jan Marsh have appeared. Jon Stallworthy's biography of Owen has had a
favorable impact upon both scholars and general readers, and his new edition
of the poems will probably be the definitive one. In addition, such books as
Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory have demonstrated that
the literary as well as the military activities of 1914-1918have in large part
shaped the contemporary world.
In the early 1960's, the literary scholar and critic David Daiches made
the following remarks about Wilfred Owen's work:
Owen was also concerned to expand the resources of
English poetic expression, but in a different way from
Eliot and those influenced by Eliot. . . .Had he lived,
English poetry would almost certainly have been less
dependent upon the Eliot school; indeed, there might have
developed an alternative and equally valuable new
tradition in postwar English poetry.

Daiches' words could easily have referred to Edward Thomas' work as well.
Now, sixty years after their deaths, these two poets seem once again in the
mainstream of English and American poetry.