The Pity of War

Abstract

In the early months of 1918 Owen decided on the subject of his poetry, stating it in his Preface in the spring as ‘War, and the pity of war’. In settling on the subject of ‘pity’ he was returning to the beliefs of the Romantics, although he was no doubt also influenced by Hardy and the new direction in Sassoon’s work. His 1918 poetry has a resonance of feeling, language and ideas which comes from his knowledge of the Romantic poets; whereas his pleasure in being ‘held peer by the Georgians’ at the end of 1917 soon ceased to represent an ambition to write in an exclusively Georgian way, his allegiance to his first masters had never faltered. His thoughts about the subject and function of his poetry in 1918 are reflected in his plans for publishing a book; the fragmentary Preface and two lists of contents which he drafted in the spring can be seen as a commentary on the poems he was writing at the time.