Abstract
Wilfred Owen might seem a curious place to end the study of the Victorian Keats, but for this study, he is the culmination of an attitude toward Keats that I have traced from Tennyson through Pater. Like Pater, Owen devises a relationship to Keats that manipulated the characterizations of Keats biography and criticism. Though Owen has been treated as a modernist, his poems before 1918 especially reveal him as a reader of Keats, Tennyson, and the poets of the 1890s. Owen uses his unambivalent reading of Keats in order to create a poetic and a social role for same-sex desire.
… it runs in my head we shall all die young.
Keats
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Notes
Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: the First World War and English Culture (London: The Bodley Head, 1990), p. 487.
Edmund Blunden, ed., The Poems of Wilfred Owen (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931), p. 3.
Dominic Hibberd, Owen the Poet (London: Macmillan, 1985), p. 9.
Though the theoretical bases behind Bernard Bergonzi’s study of 1962 (revised 1980) and Jon Silkin’s Out of Battle of 1972 differ — Bergonzi’s is traditionally historical and Silkin’s more Marxist — these readings see Owen less as a poet within a literary tradition than as one whose particular historical circumstances lead him to be considered outside of that tradition. See Bernard Bergonzi, Heroes’ Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War 2nd edition (London: Macmillan, 1980); and John Silkin, Out of Battle: the Poetry of the Great War (London: Oxford University Press, 1972).
Desmond Graham and Douglas Kerr examine those non-literary sources. See Desmond Graham, The Truth of War: Owen, Blunden, Rosenberg (Manchester: Carcanet, 1984); and Douglas Kerr, Wilfred Owen’s Voices: Language and Community (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993). Fine studies by Alan Tomlinson on Owen and Shelley and Keith V. Corner on Owen and Whitman suggest that the complex subject of Owen’s relationship to the tradition can still be a fruitful subject of inquiry. See Alan Tomlinson, “Strange Meeting in a Strange Land: Wilfred Owen and Shelley,” Studies in Romanticism 32:1 (1993) 75–95; and Keith V. Comer, Strange Meetings: Walt Whitman, Wilfred Owen, and the Poetry of War (Lund: Lund University Press, 1996).
See Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 286–95; and Hibberd, Owen the Poet, pp. 19–23.
While correcting the saintly Owen of so many narratives, Adrian Caesar’s Taking It Like a Man: Suffering, Sexuality and the War Poets equates Owen’s homosexuality with sado-masochism and suggests that Owen in the end celebrates the war he claims to be decrying because it helps form same-sex bonds. See his Taking it Like a Man: Suffering, Sexuality, and the War Poets (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 154. Caesar’s earlier published version refers to Owen’s “morbid psycho-sexual predeliction,” (p. 73) so that Owen’s sexuality is subsumed into a reading of Owen as a gifted but neurotic personality. See Caesar, “The Human Problem in Wilfred Owen,” Critical Quarterly 29:2 (1987) 67–84.
Jon Stallworthy has noticed that the young Owen modeled many of his verses on individual poems of Keats in Wilfred Owen (London: Oxford University Press and Chatto and Windus, 1974), pp. 78–9. John Purkis describes Keats’s influence chiefly in terms of Owen’s vocabulary and aural effects, particularly that of his early verse: John Purkis, A Preface to Wilfred Owen (London and New York: Longman, 1999), pp. 83, 88.
In Desmond Graham’s interpretation, Owen turned against Keats as his war experience forced him to reevaluate and reject Romanticism. See Graham, Truth of War, pp. 63–4. Sven Backman, too, implicitly believes that Owen rejected Keats in his war poetry.
Hibberd, Owen the Poet, p. 9.
Marlon Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 168.
Quotations from Owen’s poetry are from Wilfred Owen, Complete Poems and Fragments, ed. Jon Stallworthy, 2 vols. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984.)
Paul De Man, “Introduction,” to The Selected Poetry of Keats (New York: New American Library, 1966), pp. xvii—xix.
William Hazlitt, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P.P. Howe after the edition of A.R. Walker and Arnold Glover, (1931 19 vols. Rpt. AMS Press, 1967), I, 44–5.
Waldoff, Silent Work of Imagination, p. 44.
Sarah Cole, “Modernism, Male Intimacy, and the Great War,” ELH 68 (2001) 472.
In this I am distinguishing Owen’s sympathy from Whitman’s. Michael Moon notes that Whitman used terms such as “sympathy,” “friendship,” “yearning,” and “comradeship” almost interchangeably to denote same-sex erotic bonds. Michael Moon, Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of Grass (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 9. Owen is not making the same move. Owen’s term for the erotic male bond is simply “love” and in its expanded influence sometimes “pity.” Keith Corner, in his extended and intelligent study of Whitman and Owen, suggests Owen gives voice to those whom Whitman tends to silence (Comer, Strange Meetings, p. 98). Owen is not trying to disguise or adjust to same-sex eroticism but delineating its ideal societal role.
Craft, Another Kind of Love, p. 56.
The poem was first published after Tennyson’s death, in Forman’s sixth edition of Keats’s works (1898).
Desmond Graham, The Truth of War, p. 32.
Merryn Williams, Wilfred Owen (Bridgend: Severn Books, 1993), p. 95.
Owen, Complete Poems, I, 138.
Desmond Graham, The Truth of War, p. 23.
Hibberd successfully deciphers some of the cryptic poems from the midwar period as poems of homosexual protest. See Hibberd, Owen the Poet, pp. 150–4.
See the discussion in Richard Perceval Graves, A.E. Housman, the Scholar-Poet (New York: Scribners, 1980), p. 74.
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays, ed. Peter Raby (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), p. 72.
To Susan Owen, in Wilfred Owen, The Collected Letters, ed. Harold Owen and John Bell (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 482.
Owen, Letters, p. 461.
Gilbert and Gubar claim that the poem targets the entire female sex. See Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century Vol 2: Sexchanges (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 260–1. Adrian Caesar also believes the poem is no more than a misogynistic tract (Taking, p. 154).
Jennifer Breen discusses the textual connections comprehensively in “Wilfred Owen: ‘Greater Love’ and Late Romanticism,” English Literature in Transition, 17:3 (1974) 173–83.
Algernon Swinburne, The Complete Works of Algemon Charles Swinburne, ed. Sir Edmund Gosse and Thomas James Wise. 20 vols (New York: Russell and Russell, 1925), Rpt. 1968, I, 213.
Psomiades, Beauty’s Body, pp. 110–2.
Swinburne, Complete Works, I, 261.
De Man, “Introduction” to The Selected Poetry of Keats (New York: New American Library, 1966), p. xviii.
Owen to Susan Owen, 20 September 1911, Letters, p. 88.
Owen to Susan Owen, 17 September 1911, Letters, p. 83.
Owen to Susan Owen, 16 April 1912, Letters, p. 126.
Owen to Susan Owen, 20 September 1911, Letters, p. 83.
Owen to Susan Owen, 17 September 1912, Letters, p. 161.
Owen to Susan Owen, 26 April 1913, Letters, p. 187.
Owen to Susan Owen, 14 February 1914, Letters, p. 234.
Owen to Siegfried Sassoon, 5 November 1917, Letters, p. 505.
Owen to Susan Owen, 8 December 1914, Letters, p. 304.
See William Michael Rossetti, Life ofJohn Keats, pp. 60–3.
Desmond Graham, The Truth of War, p. 30.
Shelley’s Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts, Criticism, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 402.
Peter Sacks, The English Elegy, p. 161.
Heffernan, “Adonais,” p. 314.
Shelley, ed. Reiman and Powers, p. 406.
Andrew Epstein, ‘“Flowers that Mock,” p. 120.
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© 2002 James Najarian
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Najarian, J. (2002). Keats, Wilfred Owen, and a Tradition of Desire. In: Victorian Keats. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230596856_8
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