SARAH MONTIN

Keywords
Wilfred Owen, France, First World War poetry, critical reception, popular reception, translation, posterity.

Abstract
This paper explores the ambiguities of Wilfred Owen’s reception in France, from the 1920’s to 2020, through the lens of academic and intellectual criticism, literary rewriting and translation.

Resumé
Cet article explore les ambiguïtés de la réception de Wilfred Owen en France, des années 1920 à 2020, sous l’angle de la critique académique et intellectuelle, la traduction et la réécriture poétique.

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I only understand and appreciate the English when they are dead and when a thousand commentaries, published letters, diaries, fine translations and a wealth of details provided by [André] Maurois finally convince me that they are not Martians but fraternal souls. (François Mauriac, Journal, t.II, Grasset, 1937, 16).

             It is a truth generally acknowledged that, in France, “there is no real war poet of the likes of Wilfred Owen in England” (Baert et Viart, 30). War poetry remains indeed a “specifically British affair” writes poet and critic Jacques Darras, pointing to a cultural discrepancy that has often been noted in French academic circles. La Grande Guerre brings to mind a smattering of great names, primarily Charles Péguy, Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars, whose fame continues to eclipse that of other, more neglected writers (André Salmon, Charles Vildrac, René Dalize). However, none of the French soldier-poets are specifically memorialized or celebrated for their war production, nor are they officially grouped under the collective name “war poets”. In fact, writes Laurence Campa, “in their vast majority, the French poets of the war remain unknown today. Their poetic work, like much of the poetry written during that period, has been, notwithstanding a few exceptions, progressively neglected then forgotten in the course of the XX^th century” (Campa, 11), in an reverse trajectory to the rising star of the English war poets in mainstream British culture. Though France does have its “écrivains combattants”, this classification covers a multitude of writers of the First World War, out of which novelists and memorialists (Henri Barbusse, Roland Dorgelès, Georges Duhamel to name but a few), in short those detaining narrative authority, have emerged with a far greater following and influence than their fellow poets. A “forgotten genre” according to Antoine Compagnon, the reputation of French WWI poetry pales in comparison with that of the Second World War, often conflated with the poésie de la résistance which, in accordance perhaps with the greater and more complex memorialization of WWII in France, the militant agenda of its poets (René Char, Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, Paul Éluard) and the outstanding quality of their production, has been granted an essential place in the French classroom and literary canon of the twentieth century.

Thus the exceptional status of the WWI poet in Britain seems to the French at best an interesting idiosyncrasy, a form of cultural eccentricity resonant with Britain’s specific poetic insularism. The trifling place granted to First World War poetry in the French canon and national curriculum explains, by extension, the patchy reception of the British war poets in France. Unsurprisingly, Wilfred Owen, the “most famous and most praised of the World War One poets” (Caesar, 115) in Britain, is anything but a household name across the Channel. Though translated for the first time in 1934 by angliciste Louis Bonnerot, the writer Julien Green still has cause to remark in his diary entry of July 1962 that “Wilfred Owen is without a doubt the best of the English poets of 1914-1918 but who has heard of him in France?” (Green, 310). Known to English literature academics who were the first to promote his works, he remains relatively unknown to the general public. Perhaps the best indication of this oversight is Frédéric Mitterrand’s (then Minister of Culture) candid note in his journal, on being asked to inaugurate the Maison Forestière d’Ors in October 2011: “[I have been asked to] inaugurate the Maison Forestière where Wilfred Owen was billeted in the autumn of 1918 and for which the little township of Ors, a village of more or less a hundred souls, has moved heaven and earth over the last years to restore and turn into a site a memory. Wilfred Owen who?”(Mitterrand, 300).

The contrast between the overly laudatory terms with which he is presented in the French media when the occasion arises (“second author in Britain after Shakespeare” [1]) and the frequent misspelling of his name (most commonly “Wilfrid”, in the French manner, or “Wilfried” in the German one, he is also misnamed as “Wilfred Sorley” and “William Owen”), the false attribution of his works and erroneous biographical data, reveal France’s difficulty to grasp Wilfred Owen’s stature and position in the British canon. To emerge as an individual poet from a foreign “war poet” group, to stand out of the shared spotlight and gather an authority and renown separate from Siegfried Sassoon’s and Rupert Brooke’s, presented indeed one of the major obstacles to Owen’s individual recognition in France. It is only relatively recently, in the wake of his (re)discovery in the 1960’s, that he began garnering enduring critical and public attention. Replacing the long-standing myth of Rupert Brooke (bolstered by André Gide in the first half of the century), Owen became the embodiment of a young, sacrificed Edwardian manhood which holds an undeniably romantic appeal to the French audience. His “seared conscience” and rebellious figure, his anti-militaristic poems, homoerotic themes and religious questioning, all work towards forming a specific icon of sensitive, tortured youth sanctified by death, in some ways reminiscent of the national poète maudit, Arthur Rimbaud.

Remaining, throughout the century, a difficult poet to “de-mob”, which is to say, to appreciate beyond his appeal as witness to a horrific war, his reputation has undeniably suffered from his association with political and occasional poetry, a genre that is historically disregarded in France. Long remaining an “academic’s poet”, exerting more fascination over professors than the general readership, Owen’s French trajectory was a difficult climb out of revues savantes and university lectures. It is only late in the 20^th century, notably after the success of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem in France, that Owen was finally discovered by a wider public, intent on keeping his memory alive by reworking his poetry for the 21st century.

“A dark trail in the orbit where you blaze”: the early years (1920-1950)

The posthumous publication of Owen’s Poems in 1920, edited by Siegfried Sassoon and Edith Sitwell, coincides in France with a short-lived flurry of interest in the soldier-poets from across the Channel. The earliest – albeit erroneous – mention of Owen in French is to be found in a 1920 edition of L’Art Libre, a pacifist magazine, relay for the Clarté[2]movement in Belgium. Setting the tone for the coming decade, the “courageous and sincere” Siegfried Sassoon is celebrated as the most influential British war poet of his generation, while the obviously unread, portmanteau-poet “Wilfred Sorley” is only mentioned in passing. The French interpretation, or rather recuperation, of Sassoon’s specifically British brand of anti-militarism as a form of internationalist, socialist pacifisme, is confirmed in a 1921 article of the newly established Revue De France. Briefly introducing Siegfried Sassoon, alongside Wilfred Owen and Richard Aldington, the articles presents them as the only pacifist English poets to have taken war as their main subjects.

This assertion will be qualified in 1934 by the more informed Anglophone studies scholars, Louis Bonnerot and Anatole Rivoallan, two of the most important academic mediators of their time. In a special edition of Poésie devoted to “English contemporary poets”, the scholars introduce the “new war poets” beside the already established representatives of the modernist school. Chosen and translated for the occasion and presented as Owen’s most representative poem, “Anthem for Doomed Youth” (“Antienne pour la jeunesse condamnée”) remains his most cited text in France. In the same vein, later adopted by English critics F. R. Leavis and C. K. Stead, Bonnerot and Rivoallan praise the war poets’ “contact with the real and the concrete” as well as their “sensibility” which, while great, cannot however compete with the “psychological complexities” and “erudite reminiscence and intelligence” of T. S. Eliot, “true chief of the new school”. [3]

Undistinguished among his fellow war poets, Owen is thus, from his first textual introduction to the French public, presented as part of a group that is excluded from the more radically contemporary modernist chapel. The ideological quarrel in 1920’s and 30’s France between the communist war-veteran writers of the group Clarté and the all-powerful cénacle of the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF), won by the latter, will push war literature into a political niche. Favouring “cultural demobilization” by giving a platform to “la littérature pure”, the NRF sides with the modernist movement, looking to remove literature from political expression. The growing lassitude of the French public towards war publications (Marcel Proust’s Goncourt in 1919 for À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, signaling the end of the heyday of combatant literature), and the literary exploits of the avant-garde surréalistes, will further obscure the reception of the war poets in France. In 1928, the French reference dictionary Le Larousse Illustré, revealingly omits to mention Owen in its dismissive definition of British war poetry (“the poets of the war form a separate group of writers”), represented by an haphazard choice of names; Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Robert Nichols, Charles Sorley, Rupert Brooke. As in Britain, the “war poets” are by then considered as offshoots of the war and, as such, are marginalized from the modern British canon. This problem of generic categorization will remain inherent to the reception of the war poets in general and of Wilfred Owen specifically, in France.  

The 1930’s however saw a renewed appeal of war writings, both national and international, in part due to the promotion of the Clarté movement and the rise of the fascist threat in Europe. Reviving “literary pacifism” by encouraging translations from the German (notably Ernst Jünger and Erich Maria Remarque), the movement sidelines the English vein of war memoirs, excepting Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, translated in 1936.[4] French academics, on the other hand, especially attentive to contemporary English publications as well as literary trends, begin to notice the rising influence of the veteran war poets. Though still outshone by Sassoon at the turn of the decade, Owen’s reputation is bolstered by Edmund Blunden’s edition of The Poems of Wilfred Owen in 1931.The admiration it garnered from the political poets of the thirties (Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis and Louis McNeice), deepened in turn the interest of French academia, keen to keep up with the new generation of British poets. In 1931, in a paper published in the Revue Anglo-Américaine (most important platform for French Anglophone scholars of the time) discussing Edmund Blunden’s poetry, Louis Bonnerot concludes: “M. Blunden is one of the greatest […] of the war poets and probably the one with the most diverse work. He is only surpassed, in breadth of emotion and thought, by Wilfried [sic] Owen of whom he has just re-edited the poems, and Mr. S. Sassoon whose greatness is without compare”.[5] 

Throughout the 1930’s and 1940’s, Owen’s greatest champions across the Channel are thus two academics: Louis Bonnerot (founder and director of the Revue Anglo-américaine – later Études Anglaises – from 1934 to 1974) and Louis Cazamian, both professors of English literature at the Sorbonne. Gradually promoting Owen over Sassson, they will inscribe him in a larger poetic tradition and lineage, by associating him to the “Pylon poets” of the 1930’s.  This link with Auden, Day-Lewis, Spender and MacNeice singles Owen out from the reductive “war poets” group, giving him a voice of his own among the second generation modernists. In 1933, Cazamian could write, with no mention of Sassoon whatsoever: “Among the writers killed in the Great War, Rupert Brooke is the only one to have remained famous. Wilfred Owen is just beginning to garner attention and exert his influence over the new generation of poets”.[6] In 1935, Owen’s technical performances, in particular his pararhyme or “contre-assonances”, are noted and quoted as a source of Cecil Day Lewis’s innovations in Baruch.[7] For the first time – albeit always in contrast with another poet – analyzed formally and not only thematically, Owen is called “a poet of genius”. The same year, in a comparison of I.M. Parsons and Michal Roberts’celebrated anthologies,[8] F. Mossé rejoices that both anthologists agree on the most important poetic filiation of the time : “One notes with pleasure, the agreement on the essential links of the chain: Hardy, Hopkins, Yeats, Wilfrid Owen, T.S. Eliot”.[9] Wilfrid Owen [sic], still unknown enough to have his first name misspelled (and included), is admitted into an exclusive poetic canon, establishing his authority as an essential link in the birth of British modernism. In 1939, the year of France’s and the UK’s entry in the Second World War, Owen’s “Disabled” is translated by Bonnerot and published in Yggdrassil.[10] More notably perhaps one of the subjects of the agrégation d’anglais (French national teaching exam) in March 1939, is a translation of “Exposure” into French, and an essay on the following topic: “Compare Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen as War Poets” (the comparison would probably, by then, have turned in Owen’s favour). 

The onset of the Second World War hampered publications but also expanded discussion of the war poets beyond specialized academic reviews (revues savantes) and into more generalist literary publications. In a probable homage to their British allies, Les Cahiers de Paris publish in 1940, a special issue devoted to “the English poets of the last war”, giving Wilfred Owen his first article entirely devoted to him in France. However despite the revival of political poetry in France, the war did not give as much new visibility to Wilfred Owen, as it did in Britain. Two years after the end of the conflict, in 1947, Jacques Valette publishes, in the Mercure de France, a comparison between Wilfred Owen, Alun Lewis and Sydney Keys, inscribing Owen in contemporary problematics of writing on war, yet still always in comparison with other poets. The same year, Louis Cazamian’s analysis of Owen’s poetry in his panorama of English symbolism (Symbolisme et Poésie, l’exemple anglais, 1947), draws links between Owen and the Romantic poets, forging his recurring association with Keats in the next decades. This is confirmed in 1949, when Owen is categorized as a “modern romantic” as opposed to the “modern classics” (Robert Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Walt Whitman, W. B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot), in a review of Herbert Read’s Form in Modern Poetry (1948) written by J.G. Ritz. Thus far the work of French scholars during the 1930s and 40’s gradually contributed to “demobilizing” Owen’s work (lifting it out of the unique circumstances of the First World War and away from Sassoon’s influence). From then on he was considered not as the product of a specific context and genre, but as the result of a literary tradition taking its roots in the 19^th century. Still regularly undervalued or overvalued, Owen remained, however, difficult to categorize for French scholars.

Despite Owen’s growing visibility in the academic world, he was still strikingly undiscussed in French literary circles and literary magazines of the interwar and war period. This is due, in part, to the early rift between the university and the educated public in France, which opposed the“savant”to the“lettré” and saw the triumph of the “critique de soutien” (written by journalists such as Charles Maurras, and non-academic intellectuals such as André Gide), over the “critique professorale” (written by scholars). Emblematically, André Maurois, one of the most prominent critics of the times, recognized expert of all things British and anglophile author of an eccentric war novel based on his experience in the British Expeditionary Forces (Les Silences du Colonel Bramble, 1918), never once mentions Owen in his public and private writings. The most influential literary circle of the times, dominated by the NRF (“the closest French entity corresponding to Bloomsbury”, Caws, 8), was indeed much more interested in the cosmopolitan, often Paris-based, modernist poets, with whom they had established a rapport since before the First World War, notably through the great passeur Rémy de Gourmont. Jacques Rivière, André Gide, Paul Valéry, Valéry Larbaux, François Mauriac, to name but a few of the era’s luminaries, show no indication of having heard of Owen, although (and perhaps because?) some of them had known and admired Rupert Brooke. Knowledge of one or two English poets seemed to suffice to these French writers still living in the aura of a mythical England: “Claudel knew Patmore and Hopkins, Gide Oscar Wilde. That was enough”(Guérin, 68). The only French intellectual to have expressed an interest in Owen at the time was the Franco-American, bilingual writer Julien Green.

Julien Green and Wilfred Owen

Julien Green (1900-1998), half-French, half-American writer of the écrivain catholique school, great friend of Gide and Mauriac, was an author of considerable repute in the mid-century (perhaps the most convincing testament to his notoriety is the impressive eight tomes Pléiade edition of his complete works). His discovery of Wilfred Owen’s poetry during the Second World War, and his deepening interest in the poet’s life in the following decades, is faithfully chronicled in his Journal. Praising the British war poets for their “burning, living poetry”[11] of which he finds no echo in France, he is, as a fervent admirer of Keats, particularly drawn to Owen who reveals, according to him, a remarkable linguistic and symbolic kinship with the young Romantic poet. Reading Owen’s more political war poems during WWII, he commends his “vision unadulterated by literature”: “He saw the war without illusion, without literature, he saw it as it deserved to be seen: with horror”.[12] This prompts him to take Owen’s defense upon discovering that Yeats had deliberately excluded him from his Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936) : “What to say of the anthology of modern poets published by Yeats other than that it shows the dwindling critical faculties of old men?”[13]

Progressing from Owen’s poems to his biography and correspondence as they are published in the 1960’s, Green’s discovery of the man behind the works, leads him to romanticize the young poet “who knew the power of his strange smile”.[14] No longer reading him in political terms, his passionate, if distant, appreciation of Owen turns into a fascination tinged with erotic fantasy. As a conflicted Catholic, he admires Owen’s courage and rebellion against “official Christianity”,[15] which he attributes to Owen’s passionate temper, brimming with sensuality: “He was a man of strong sexuality, with a dangerous irritability which didn’t exclude the extreme and seductive sweetness of his smile”.[16] Projecting his moral and religious dilemmas on the young poet, Green reads rightly behind the lines of Owen’s own repressed homosexuality. His appreciation of Owen’s “painful, burning calling”, is expressed in quasi-Decadent terms: “He sacrifices himself to poetry with the fervor of a Roman seminarian, giving himself up to celibacy”.[17] Julien Green’s infatuation is not uncommon among readers of Wilfred Owen, often more interested in the emotional and sensual appeal of his character than in his writings per se. Julien Green’s passionate devotion to the young war poet is shared by many of his later readers and no doubt, greatly contributed to promoting the myth of Wilfred Owen, in France as in the UK.

Towards celebrity? (1960-2020)

Since the 1950’s, thanks to his frequent appearance in French anthologies of British poetry and in the Bulletin des Langues anglaises, Wilfred Owen is now considered, by most scholars, as one of the “known voices”of the British canon. Mentioned regularly in publications destined for school and university students (such as André Maisonneuve’s anthology Present and Past, Floris Delattre’s Feux d’automne, or René Lalou’s Histoire de la littérature anglaise), he is now part of the canonical history of British literature.

As in Britain, it is the 1960’s that consecrate Wilfred Owen as the most important and recognized poet of World War One whose name has become almost synonymous with war poetry. The 50^th anniversary of World War One, together with the rise of the movement against the Vietnam War and a new, popular, interest in “protest poetry”, contributed to Owen’s rising star in Britain, which in turn shifted the tone of the discussion in France. Georges Bas’ important review of the 1964 edition of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury reveals a clear shift in taste and sensibilities: “But the reversal of hierarchies is manifest in certain marked preferences: Meredith and Swinburne only have two poems to their name […] where Hopkins has fourteen, Hardy eleven, Yeats fifteen and DH Lawrence seven. Rupert Brooke’s absence from the collection while Wilfrid [sic] Owen features five poems shows how the latter’s reputation has never ceased to rise”.[18] The 1960’s saw indeed a flourish of important publications devoted to Owen in the Anglophone world, including the first critical study devoted to Owen (D.S.R. Welland Wilfred Owen: A Critical Study, 1960) Cecil Day Lewis’s new edition of his poems in 1963 (The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen), Harold Owen’s major biography (Journey From Obscurity, 1963-65), Gertrude White’s presentation to the American public (Wilfred Owen, 1969), as well as the publication of his correspondence (Harold Owen co-editor, The Collected Letters of Wilfred Owen, 1967). These publications drew French academic focus away from the texts to the poet’s life and personality, ushering in the era of biographical and psycho-criticism. In light of the new revelations shed on Owen’s youth, the romantic meta-narrative of his life definitely takes over Rupert Brooke’s lingering legend. The most recurrent key-words attached to French studies of Owen underline his sensibility, his humanism, his Christ-like passion, in such articles or chapter headings as: “The Passion of Wilfred Owen”, “The Messianism of Wilfred Owen” or “Wilfred Owen’s Lament”. “Emotion”, “revolt”, “tenderness”, “love”, all these characterize the “rebellious” Wilfred Owen (“poète révolté” is particularly used in those days of social unrest in France), an emphasis on emotional traits which did not help Owen’s intellectual reputation in France in the heyday of structuralism and formalist critical reading.

Although the poet and translator Jacques Darras wrily notes that his master’s thesis on Wilfred Owen made no waves at the Sorbonne in 1963, Owen had become by then a more fashionable subject, as attested by the growing number of academic articles published about him in 1960’s France (as a point of comparison, we only find one German work on Wilfred Owen in the period from 1920 to 1960[19]) and culminating in Roland Bouyssou’s thèse d’état published in 1974 – first French thesis to be devoted to the war poets in France, and which gives a central place to Wilfred Owen. Since the 1970’s a steady stream of articles devoted to Wilfred Owen appear in French academic journals. However, while Owen’s works were becoming a prominent area of study in Britain in the 1980’s-1990’s,[20] French academics did not contribute any full-length studies, biographies, or conceptual breakthroughs to this critical resurgence. If he is alluded to in Dans l’aventure du langage , written by writer and poet Georges-Emmanuel Clancier in 1987, as one of the forgotten forefathers of modern English poetry (“The ‘father’ of modern English poetry is, unquestionably, T.S. Eliot, preceded only by a few poets who, through their use of language as Yeats, or their inspiration as Wilfrid [sic] Owen, had something new to offer”, Clancier 239), he remains an admired but foreign phenomenon in France, still often considered as an overpraised minor poet.

Recent university manuals reveal perhaps more than academic articles, the manner in which the war poets, and Wilfred Owen specifically, are still, always briefly and often disparagingly, introduced to French students. Still stuck in the mire of war and presented as a literary parenthesis in a 20^th century marked by modernist giants, the war poets invariably act as historic background to T.S. Eliot, Pound and Yeats. Grellet and Valentin’s fifth edition (2013) of An Introduction to English Literature (reference for all undergraduate students and most widely circulated university handbook), only mentions “W. Owen Poems (1920)” in a list of publications of the 20^th century, but doesn’t bother with a page to his name or a biography. The only other mention of his contribution to literature is to be found in a paragraph on “imperfect rhyme” (rather than pararhyme), with examples taken from “Exposure”.[21] In 2013, Elizabeth Angel-Perez’s Histoire de la littérature anglaise quotes “Strange Meeting”, and mentions Owen at the end of a page devoted to the war poets which appears under the revealing heading “Conjectural and political poetry”. In Laroque, Regard and Morvan’s Histoire de la littérature anglaise, the war poets are given more page space but are considered according to their potential, what they could have been rather than what they effectively achieved (“What would have been the face and the fate of English poetry had these men reached their artistic maturity, it is impossible to say”). Thus Owen, and the war poets in general, still suffer from the disinterest of the more generalist reader or critic, for reasons particular to French poetic and academic taste: the humanist emotion underpinning Owen’s poetry is not particularly admired by French formalist criticism (“niaiserie sentimentale”, as André Breton used to say of Barbusse’s humanism), while occasional poetry (poésie de circonstance) is still considered a suspicious genre by critics influenced by the long-standing debate (revived by Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1950’s) on the “impurity” of political and historical poetry.

Recent trends

The centenary of the First World War, as well as of Wilfred Owen’s death, has renewed academic interest and fostered popular enthusiasm in his life and works. In April 2014, Le Monde des Livres devoted an article to the reputation of the Great War in Britain, as did the Revue des Deux Mondes. However, it is the construction of the Maison d’Ors in 2011, an architectural novelty discussed in numerous regional papers, which truly paved the way for a more popular recognition of Wilfred Owen, grounded in regional politics of commemoration. Owen’s last stop in Ors is consecrated by its first fictional appearance in politician Jacques Attali’s rather surprising 2017 thriller, Premier arrêt après la mort (First Stop after Death). The novel’s Owen-centric plot (a murderer signs his deeds with lines from Owen’s poems) takes place along the “Wilfred Owen memorial route”where Inspector Fatima Hadj investigates the murders. This is not the first time Owen appears in a Francophone novel, even detective fiction, as the greater public had already discovered him in Xavier Hanotte’s Barthélémy Dussert detective mysteries. Since the construction of the Maison d’Ors, Owen has indeed received more press coverage than ever, from being a recurring subject in Le Courrier Picard and La Voix du Nord (a widely-circulated regional daily, with a a distribution of 1 million) to a brief documentary on France 3 Haut-de-France (“Wilfred Owen, The Poet of Pain”). Though his memory, relied at first, in the North of France, entirely on British visitors and the incredible motivation of a few French locals, the Maison d’Ors has favoured public engagement and a renewed academic interest and investment. An issue of the review Nord, devoted entirely to Wilfred Owen: poète de la guerre et des tranchées (2014), as well as the first French PhD thesis to be written on him (albeit in conjunction with Keats) and a selection of recent scholarly articles, confirm the renewal of interest in recent years. Several exhibitions featuring or working around his poems (“Les poètes-soldats britanniques et la mémoire de 1914” at the Université de Vincennes Library, 2014, “Résonances”, an art project on Wilfred Owen’s afterlife, Université Hauts-de-France/Centre d’Arts Ronzier, 2018), as well as a show (“Vous pouvez le faire savoir via Owen-Owen” by Anthony Vienne and Cedric Henninot, 2014) and several documentaries (among which Anne Mourgues’s La Plume et le Fusil) testify to a greater appreciation and recognition of the poet in France and show that Owen’s name has become, at least in the North of France, synonymous with the Great War.

Revived in translation

Owen’s longstanding lack of recognition in France can be attributed, in part, to the dearth of comprehensive translations of his work. From 1920 to the 1990’s, only isolated poems of his are translated, preventing the benefit of a full collection which would have revealed the poet in all his complexity, from juvenilia to mature years. This is compounded by the fact that Owen’s poetry never caught the eye of a star-translator such as Pierre Leyris (celebrated translator of Hopkins), a name which would have probably ensured Owen a standing in Gallimard’s prestigious and popular “Poésie NRF” collection. As for poet-translators Pierre Jean Jouve, Jean Mambrino, Yves Bonnefoy or Jean-Yves Masson, they were seemingly occupied by greater (re)discoveries and (re)translations from the 1950’s to the 1990’s, such as Eliot, Yeats, Hopkins, Lawrence, or Shakespeare.  

Throughout the century, translations of his poems and, later, his correspondence, by passionate academics such as Louis Bonnerot, Gérard Hardin and Roland Bouyssou, contributed to keeping Owen’s writings alive in French. However these translations were confined to learned journals, as a topic more suited to the academic world and the classroom than to general consumption. As a canonical poet, Owen however regularly appears in anthologies, starting with Louis Cazamian’s Anthologie de la Poésie Anglaise (1947) and later in more specialized editions such as Roger Asselineau’s Poètes anglais de la Grande Guerre (1991) or Roland Bouyssou’s Anthologie des poètes anglais de la Grande Guerre (2008). The reference Pléiade anthology, Anthologie bilingue de la poése anglaise (1995, re-edited in 2005) also features three of Owen’s poems. Thus Owen was, for most of the century, a poet of wide-ranging anthologies and learned journals, recognized for his more militant purple-patches but rarely as a career or fully-fledged poet.

One of the greatest mediators of his work in the educated French public was, albeit unwittingly, Benjamin Britten. It is through him, rather than in books, that creators, poets and artists alike, discovered Owen and contributed to giving him a new life in French. Britten’s War Requiem, which premièred in France in 1963 (and was performed again in 1967 for the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Passchendaele[22]), introduced the French music-loving public[23] to Wilfred Owen’s poems through the Requiem’s libretto. While it did not deeply modify the poet’s reception, it does explain why Owen’s best-known poems in France are not necessarily the ones favoured by an English public (“The Parable of the Old Man and the Young” is indeed very popular, while “Dulce et Decorum Est”, which does not feature in the libretto, is not as appreciated as in the UK). Today still, the poems most translated by amateurs on French internet sites and fora are extracted from Benjamin Britten’s libretto. Unsurprisingly, the first book-length translation of Owen’s poems, by poet and publisher Emmanuel Malherbet (also translator of Siegfried Sassoon), was Poèmes du War Requiem de Benjamin Britten, Alidades, 1995),translated in reaction to the poor quality of the French version of the poems offered in the libretto. This late – and confidential – publication came a few years after the 1992 representation at the Salle Pleyel, which signed the beginning of the War Requiem’s real notoriety in France. Malherbet later came back to Wilfred Owen with a more comprehensive collection of the Poèmes de Guerre de Wilfred Owen, (Éditions Cazimi, 2004), presenting Owen as one of the great English poets, forgotten by the French public, in a subtle style, both elegant and idiomatic and very close to Owen’s voice in English: “[The collection] offers a most poignant point of view on the horrors of war and human suffering and constitutes a great lesson of poetry. Though he was mowed down in the flower of his youth, Owen undoubtedly deserves a place among the greats”.[24]

His 2004 edition however came after the much more publicized translation of Owen’s poems, by Belgian novelist and translator, Xavier Hanotte (also a long-time President of the French Wilfred Owen Association). Published by the well-known French poetry publishing house, Le Castor Astral, Hanotte’s Et Chaque lent crépuscule (2001, republished 2012), was very well received as revealed by the reviews in Le Monde and Mediapart. Presented as a “forgotten classic”, it is Owen’s first real introduction to the larger French audience. Like Owen’s first translator Malherbet, Xavier Hanotte first encountered Owen through Britten’s War Requiem. Since discovering him in 1984, Xavier Hannotte has consistently dedicated his literary career to Wilfred Owen, through his novels in which he is a recurring character, and through the character of his detective-translator Barthélémy Dussert, the fictional translator credited in the Castor Astral edition of Et Chaque lent crépuscule. Hanotte’s novels and translations undoubtedly brought Owen a larger audience in the Francophone world. Like Malherbet before him, Hanotte worked on modernizing and pairing-down Owen’s voice in French, still hampered by the slightly stilted, classical translations of the 1950’s and 1960’s. In the years 2000, new isolated versions of poems appear online (in particular Anne Mounic and Jean Migrenne’s translations in the poetry magazine Peut-être), as well two new full translations in much smaller publishing houses, by ardent fans of the poet: Claude Dandréa’s Poèmes choisis de Wilfred Owen (Brumerge, 2018) and Bernard Frouin’s Poèmes de Guerre (Desvoj, 2018). Other poets have produced creation-translations, as for example Jacques Darras (Grand Prix de poésie de l’Académie Française) in his striking “cursive/discursive poem”, Je sors enfin du Bois de la Gruerie (Arfuyen, 2014), which integrates, alongside extracts of memoirs, documentation and Pierre-Jean Jouve’s poem, his different translations of Owen, Sassoon, Graves and Edward Thomas. In a similar manner, Marie-Hélène Prouteau’s Le Cœur est une place forte (La Part commune, 2019) quotes Owen alongside Paul Celan, in a poetic memoir of her family.

Owen’s first poem to be translated into French (Louis Bonnerot, 1934) the very classical sonnet “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, has become over the years his most representative – the poem of a lost generation closely connected to France’s “génération sacrifiée”. The numerous translations of this particular poem, the fertile variation on its title, reveal the persistent fascination for the slightly foreign yet familiar conception of the war revealed through Owen’s eyes. Starting with Bonnerot’s 1934 “Antienne à une jeunesse condamnée”, with its interesting choice of the word “antienne” reminiscent of Verlaine’s Romances sans paroles, “Anthem for Doomed Youth” was long translated in the pseudo-archaic symbolist style. It remains his most quoted work today and has, notably given its title to Xavier Hanotte’s 2001 Et Chaque lent crepuscule – “each slow dusk”, echoing the last line of the sonnet. The choice of Owen’s poems in the Pléiade’s Anthologie bilingue de la littérature anglaise, though limited, features in first place “Anthem for Doomed Youth” (“Chant Funèbre pour une jeunesse condamnée”, the rendition of the word “anthem” presenting once more a complication for the French translator who seems here influenced by Britten’s Requiem), followed by the canonical but relatively unloved – at least in France – “Dulce et Decorum Est” and the more surprising choice of “Disabled” (“L’Invalide”, first translated by Louis Bonnerot in 1939). Revealing the striking evolution in taste that has taken place in France over the century, Isaac Rosenberg and Ivor Gurney are the only other war poets to be featured alongside Wilfred Owen in the anthology, while Sassoon is revealingly absent from the selection. All in all, Owen has had many more translators into French than Sassoon (Bernard Le Floch in 1987 and Emmanuel Malherbet in 2005), revealing a discrete but renewed admiration of his work and a constant wish to reactivate the richness and strangeness of his language in French.

From the “European war” to an European poet

Despite a century of articles and translations, Owen remains a relatively confidential poet in France, interesting artists, historians and students alike, yet remaining in the shadow of his greater modernist counterparts. Often less read than he is admired for (and preceded by) his legend, Owen’s reputation in France remains in that no-man’s land between relative notoriety and oblivion, depending on the region where he is encountered. Contrary to the United Kingdom where Owen’s ever-increasing popularity stems mainly from his historical association with the First World War, his lack of serious literary and academic recognition in France is undoubtedly due to the enduring stigma of occasional literature, as well as Owen’s idiosyncratic mixture of poetry and politics. Already associated in the 1920’s and 1930’s with the pacifist movement and recuperated for his political convictions, he is once again taken up today in an internationalist, pro-European discourse, in an effort to unite Europeans around common history or “values”, as exemplified by the principal of a French lycée telling his students in 2011 “Wilfred Owen constitutes an example for European youth, as a poet and as a man who fought for our values”[25] (which values exactly remains to be seen). Recent years have indeed seen a flourishing of manifestations and books on the European theme, in which Owen is held up next to his German and French counterparts in an attempt to promote the idea of a “Europe of Poets”. Still hailed as a political model and as an example to future generations a hundred years after his death, Owen has become, if not exactly a “fraternal soul” in Mauriac’s meaning of the word, an enduring symbol of fraternity among those nations who once “trekked from progress”.

Bibliography

Frank Baert, Dominique Viart (eds.). La littérature française contemporaine : questions et perspectives. Louvain, Leuven University Press, 1995.

Caesar, Adrian. Taking It Like a Man: Suffering, Sexuality and the War Poets. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1993.

Campa, Laurence. Poètes de la Grande Guerre, Expérience combattante et activité poétique. Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2010.

Caws, Mary Ann, Wright, Sarah Bird. Bloomsbury and France: Art and Friends. Oxford, OUP, 1999.

Clancier, George-Emmanuel. Dans l’aventure du langage. Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1987.

Darras, Jacques. “This Side of the Somme”, English Literature of the Great War Revisited (ed. Michel Roucoux), Amiens, Presses de l’UFR CLERC-Université de Picardie, 1989.

Guérin, Jeanyves. “John Bull et Marianne”, L’Angleterre à contre-courant, Esprit, 7/1985.

Green, Julien. Œuvres Complètes. éd. Jacques Petit, Paris, Gallimard, coll. “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade”, t.IV, V.

Mitterrand, Frédéric. La Récréation. Paris, Robert Laffont, 2013.

[1]As noted in the 2021 edition of the famous French guide book, Le Petit Futé (Dominique Auzias, Jean-Paul Labourdette, Lieux de Mémoire en France, 2021).

[2] First socialist movement born of the war, created by Henri Barbusse in 1919 alongside his “novel-manifesto” entitled Clarté. Laurent Tailhade, who had met Owen before the war, was part of the Clarté movement, along with Georges Duhamel, Jules Romains, Roland Dorgelès, Charles Vildrac ,René Arcos, Léon Werth, Paul Fort, Pierre Jean Jouve, Anatole France, Paul Vailland-Couturier, Léon Blum, etc.

[3] “Poètes anglais contemporains” (traduits et présentés par L. Bonnerot et A. Rivoallan, Poésie, 13/9, septembre, Paris, Editions la Caravelle, 1934, p. 163.

[4] Mémoires d’un chasseur de renard appears in French in 1936, an early recognition considering Graves’ Goodbye to All That was first translated in 1965 (Adieu à tout cela, trans. Robert Pépin) and Blunden’s Understones of War weretranslated into French in 2018 (La Guerre en demi-teintes, trans. Francis Grembert). Upon its publication in 1928, Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man garnered an admiring review in Le Figaro (1/11/1930), which seems at times significantly vague, appearing to confuse Sassoon and Owen: “Are we going to have a translation of that beautiful work of the English poet Siegfried Sassoon, The Pity of War?”.

[5] Louis Bonnerot, “La poésie d’Edmund Blunden”, Revue Anglo-Américaine, octobre 1930, année 8, n°1, 507.

[6] Louis Bonnerot, “Edward Thomas”, Revue Anglo-Américaine, octobre 1933, année 11, n°1, p.298.

[7] E.M. Reynaud,  “Un poète anglais ‘nouveau’ : M.C. Day Lewis”, Revue Anglo-Américaine, octobre 1935, année 13, p. 408.

[8] The Progress of Poetry, an Anthology of Verse from Hardy to the Present Day (I.M. Parsons, London, Chatto and Windus) and The Faber Book of Modern Verse (Michael Roberts, London, Faber and Faber).

[9] F. Mossé, Les Langues Modernes: Bulletin Mensuel, 34/6, 1936, p. 391.

[10] Yggdrassil, July-August 1939, p. 256-7.

[11] “There is something special in the fact that most of the young Englishman who died at the Front hated war instinctively and expressed themselves with such frankness and brutality that they are still read today. It is a burning, living poetry whose voice cannot be extinguished as it heralds the great massacres to come”. Julien Green, Oeuvres Complètes, éd. Jacques Petit, Paris, Gallimard, coll. “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade”, 22 January 1972, t.V, p. 635.

[12] 14 September 1944, Ibid., t. IV, p. 806.

[13] 21 March 1951, Ibid., t.V, p. 1211.

[14] 28 November. 1969, t. V, p. 539

[15] 8 November 1969, t. V, p. 536.

[16] Idem.

[17] 2 December1969, t.V, p. 540.

[18] George Bas, “Quatrième tentative”, les langues modernes, 61/4, juillet-août 1967, p. 486.

[19] H. Combecher, “Owen : Exposure”, In Die modern englische Lyrik, (ed. H. Oppel), Berlin, 1967.

[20] Among others, Jon Stallworthy’s edition of the Complete Poems and Fragments (1983), Dominic Hibberd’s Owen the Poet (1986) and Douglas Kerr’s Wilfred Owen’s Voices : Language and Community (1993).

[21] This was amended in the 2015 Anthologie de la littérature Anglophone, with two pages dedicated to Owen, quotation in full of “Strange Meeting” and the mention pararhyme.

[22] My thanks to Gilles Couderc for this information.

[23] François Léotard, François Mittérand’s then Minister of Culture (1986-1988), recounts hearing Britten’s War Requiem : “That evening, a concert at the Invalides. A very beautiful work by Britten, created in 1962, is performed. It is built around the text of a young British poet, Wilfrid Owen [sic], who died at twenty-five, a few days before the Armistice in 1918. An admirable piece of work, rarely performed in France and that I listen to with fervor. I have the feeling of participating – in the middle of the musicians – in a conjuration of the war”(Ma Liberté, Paris, Plon,1995, 54).

[24] Presentation on publisher’s site : http://www.alidades.fr/owen.html. Retrieved 19 July 2020.

[25] Mireille Gueissaz, “Français et Britanniques dans la Somme. Sur quelques manières de visiter les champs de bataille de la Somme hier et aujourd’hui”, Tumultes, vol. 16, no. 1, 2001, pp. 83-104.

Sarah Montin is Senior Lecturer in literature and translation at the Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle. She works on classical and contemporary war poetry and has published Contourner l’abîme, Les poètes-combattants britanniques à l’épreuve de la Grande Guerre (Sorbonne Université Presses, 2018). She has also translated several of the WWI poets into French, including Wilfred Owen, and most notably Ivor Gurney and Isaac Rosenberg for the Éditions Alidades. 

THOMAS VUONG

Keywords
Wilfred Owen, sonnet, imaginary, cultural transfers, Verlaine, heterolinguism, ecopoetics

Abstract
This paper challenges the idea of Wilfred Owen as a British literary orphan who had to set himself under French poetic influences. Relying on the concept of imaginary, this paper shows how French landscapes are but a vague, land-disconnected support for the poet’s idiosyncratic meditations and how the sparse use of French words in his poetry is not directly connected to any imaginary of France proper. A comparison between Owen’s “On a Dream” with Verlaine’s “Mon rêve familier” goes further in nuancing any clear French influence on the English poet. Finally, a comprehensive analysis of the sonnets’ rhyming schemes throughout Owen’s work underlines how any suggestion of French influence must be understood through broader aesthetics of variety.

Résumé
Cet article discute la thèse qui voudrait que Wilfred Owen soit un orphelin littéraire britannique, qui aurait trouvé sa place au moyen d’influences poétiques françaises. En utilisant le concept d’imaginaire comme prisme d’analyse, on étudie l’évocation de paysages français et l’usage restreint du lexique francophone, guère reliés chez Owen à un imaginaire de la France elle-même. Une comparaison de « On a Dream » avec « Mon rêve familier » de Verlaine permet de nuancer davantage l’influence de la poésie française sur le poète anglais. Pour finir, une analyse exhaustive des schémas de rimes employés par Owen dans ses sonnets souligne à quel point cette influence ne peut être comprise qu’au sein de l’évocation plus large d’une esthétique de la variété.

__________________

As a comparatist scholar of the sonnet, I was first driven to reading Wilfred Owen through his diversified use of the form, which led me to discover a poet in the fullness of the term. The sonnet form has functioned as a gateway to the study of his work, which has led me to formulate a few hypotheses related to Owen’s poetic relation with France, which I find ambiguous.

 Owen Knowles has already noted (Knowles 7) the inner contradiction between Owen’s perception of himself, in January 1913 (Owen 1967, 172), as a literary orphan and his use of the sonnet – a form inherited from the Victorians and Georgians – that starts immediately afterwards: the poet is one of the most prominent renovators of the British sonnet during the First World War.

My assumption is therefore that, although Owen did read French literature and to a certain extent set himself in the French landscape, in both a literary and a literal sense, the sonnet can function as a touchstone of the primarily English nature of his work during his sojourns in France.

In order to assess that specific nature, I will use the notion of imaginary, meaning all the pre-formed representations of the world and of all ideas which help an individual project his mind towards the superior dimensions of life – as Bonnefoy puts it, an imaginary is all the figments of imagination on which literature flows (Bonnefoy 103). It is also, on the other hand, an assessment of the unknown by superimposing upon it one’s personal set of representations, fascinations, underlying ideological prisms, in a way that both prevents from looking at the world the way it is and helps to develop an idiosyncratic relation with it (Houdebine), even turning it into a piece of art when it comes to a poet.

I will first look at a few of his depictions of French landscapes, both before and during the War, then I will focus on his sparse use of French words in his poems, which tends to reveal the marginal presence of France proper. I will finally try to show how the variations of the sonnet form in his work relate more to an English tradition than to French poetry.

French Landscapes: between allegory and realism, a myopic perspective

The most obvious influence of France on Owen’s poetry is the presence of French landscapes, from the relatively happy days before the War when he lived in the South-West of France to the Northern forests and mud of the Western Front.

He repeatedly offered realistic depictions of the French countryside. “From my diary, July 1914” for instance contains some pretty allusive references to a characterisation of the Pyrenees – set between “upland” and the “peak” of the Pyrénées, the scorching July “heat” is definitely French. However, Owen reduces his experience to fragments and flashes, and who is to say boys jumping in an “ebony pond” are specifically French? This myopia – or short-sightedness – is characteristic of Owen’s talent: he depicts war and the world through a highly subjective and narrowly focused lens. And this, as we will see later, tends to lead him to inscribe his realistic depictions in the expression of a universal experience, thus revealing his rather loose attachment to the world. Besides, the poet writes with England in mind and ear, and thus spells “Pyrenees” in English – which here rhymes with “trees”.

Later on, during the War, he offers depictions of the French frontline, although quite imprecise and without much reference to France per se, as for instance in “The Sentry” and “Miners”. The former focuses on an “old Boche dug-out” that gets filled with the ever-present mud, in a vivid depiction of the living conditions on the frontline: “mud”, “clay”, “murk of air”, “slush”, “waterfalls of slime”, etc., all tend to evoke a sort of liquid hell, full of “fumes of whizz-bangs” and the “curse” of enemies who have been rotting too long in their underground “den”. Although the rendering is realistic, there is little recognizable as France. The war here rather becomes its own country of elemental tortures, far from Sassoon’s “radiant forests” in his heavenly “France” (Sassoon 4). Owen thus composes an amazing poem rooted in an English situation (written in Scarborough, early in 1918) and moving towards the landscape of the trenches: the initial domestic setting leaves room for reminiscences and fantasies of the war, all coming through the allegory of mining. Once again, the frontline appears as its own primal, partly underground, country. Neither of these poems, which start in rather realistic situations, actually refers to anything specifically French, and they show the war to be its own country, one of elemental dystopia and human nightmare.

There is a tendency, in Owen’s poetry, to turn what could be realistic depictions into allegorical or mythic landscapes.

One of its most striking examples is the sonnet “Hospital Barge at Cérisy” [sic]: the depiction of a French village on the banks of the Somme, a dozen kilometers from Quivières (whose name is incorrectly spelt, since it probably is “Cerisy”, without an accent this time) gives way to a Celtic imagery, or rather imaginary for there is little image and only nominal abstraction. Marc D. Cyr notes the probable influence of Tennyson (Cyr, 1994, 6). The longing could also be associated with the Welsh hiraeth, a Celtic equivalent of Portuguese’s famous saudade, as it evokes both homesickness and a yearning for what is out of reach – the past, the dead, the dream, the end of strife, etc. The realistic “sluggard ripples of the Somme” and sound of “engines” of the first lines move into “fairy tinkling” as the octave of the sonnet progresses, before any kind of grounded gaze upon the world leaves place, at the end of the sestet, to a dream of “Avalon” or the Fortunate Isles, that is to say, myth. This mythical imaginary is rooted in English poetry and culture, for in a May 1917 letter to his mother (Owen 1967, 457), in which he talks about his going down the Somme on a barge alongside a wounded soldier, he uses passages of The Faerie Queen to describe his peculiar experience.

 Furthermore, it is to be noted that in that very letter, the evocation of Arthuriana ends on the threat of the “Saxon”, with the real-life Owen using the common, jingoistic lexicon of the time: different situations of writing lead him to draw from different linguistic imaginaries, quite expectedly so for a poet who tries to make sense of the immediate war context. Here, the poet’s sight is not myopic anymore but rather focused on a far-flung target, one that stems from his mind rather than from the actual world.

In “At a Calvary near the Ancre”, the only indication of an actual scenery lies in the title with the mention of the French stream that flows near Albert. It then disappears from the body of the poem. If the calvary is a specific landmark of rural Catholic France, its depiction quickly blurs the limit between the representation of Jesus’s end and the surrounding landscape, itself a vanishing presence. The first stanza evokes “shelled roads” that refer to First World War landscapes without evoking anything particularly French, unless one considers again – not unjustifiably – that the war constitutes its own country and that the British troops sent to the front cannot possibly experience any part of France as much as they do this hellish place. The poem’s second stanza shifts towards a more allegorical landscape, with biblical Golgotha along which “stroll many a priest”, a quite unlikely sight in 1918-Jerusalem, thus showing how Owen systematically strays from what he sees in order to link it to a wider perspective. The final evocation of “soldiers” can refer to the Roman legionaries guarding Jesus’s last ordeals as much as Owen’s companions: the way the poet weaves his poem makes it necessary for the concrete world around him to be superimposed with a timeless meditation, that turns out to be quite the opposite of realism here.

The “Ancre”, on the banks of which two battles took place in 1916 (October and November), is therefore just a French word in the title. France here is just some kind of geographical notation as in a letter or a diary, not an actual landscape. It is the scene of rêverie, not its object as the Somme might have somehow been.

 “Spring Offensive” also provides an unreal depiction of a war landscape, where violence is systematically attributed to an elemental force – sky or earth. Since the title may yield two different meanings, either an attack led in spring, or the season itself attacking, this presentation of nature as the enemy is no surprise. Owen grew increasingly disenchanted with patriotism and the very idea of good sides, hence this blurring of the human dimension of killing: it is the war, not soldiers, that kills. It is probably important to link this abstraction of war with his own growing implication in killing, such as his daring, or desperate, part in a killing spree on October 1^st, 1918 that led him to be awarded the Military Cross.

French words, French imaginary?

While he studied French at school and college in Reading, Owen grew acquainted with French literature mostly as an autodidact: he writes about reading in French in 1911, while in Torquay (translating an excerpt from Daudet to his mother). When the First World War breaks out, Owen is trying to make a living in Bordeaux. In a postcard to his mother, dated September 30^th, he writes about studying French literature, with no further detail (Owen 1967, 286). It is interesting to see how this most Francophile of all the War Poets uses French words, and overall French language, throughout his work, as he steers between superficiality and interlingual dialogism.

A conclusive grasp – if not mastery – of French within a poetical context comes when Owen mimics the British soldiers’ poor grasp of French as he addresses the issue of verbal communication with his fellow fighters. In a note added to the first seventeen lines of what would be his last poem, “Spring Offensive” (begun in Scarborough in July 1918 and revised in France in September), he asks Sassoon (who received the lines on September 22^nd):

Is this worth going on with? I don’t want to write anything to which a soldier would say No Compris! (Owen 1983, 193)

Less poetically, he peppered his letters with French words or sentences: “Adieu mon petit. Je t’embrasse” (Owen 1967, 446), or, earlier, like in 1912 when he distinguishes reading “à bas” and “à haute voix” (Owen 1967, 161) while “à voix basse” would be the correct French formulation.

A specific focus on his poetry does not belie this general picture of a rather loose relation to France. Some poems just have a French title: “Le Christianisme” and “À Terre” are both vivid pictures of life – and death – in the North of France. In the former, the “Virgin still immaculate”, a probable statuette or icon still standing in the rubble of a church in “Le Christianisme” is typically Catholic, if not specifically French. However, in the specific context of British troops engaged in the First World War, the imaginary this poem builds does gesture towards France, if only merely with its title – a minimalism that fits the brevity of the eight-line poem. More important is the fact that this effigy too is doomed to hell, which shows how strongly the poem tends towards the metaphysical rather than the documentary.

As for the other poem, “À Terre”, it does not reflect much on anything French, rather on an English soldier’s expression (“pushing up daisies”) and a line by Shelley. Besides, while its title does sound standard French, meaning both “downtrodden” and “having thrown oneself to the ground”, it seems that the most fitting French wording to define what the poem puts forth may rather be “En terre”, as in “Buried in/under the ground”. Indeed, the speaker’s state is one of near-death, explicitly in the second stanza and in the sixth on. Furthermore, most of the moments when the speaker dreams of being “à terre”, downtrodden or humiliated, it is in a dialectic relation with a death impulse, one of being “en terre”. The speaker’s dreams of social humbling in the fifth stanza come from the comparison of being a lower-class worker or simply dead, while his ironically literal take on Shelley leads to the post-mortem dissolution of the material self. Not only has “À Terre” very little to do with France and everything with the English language, its French title is actually misleading.

Owen’s most famous use of French, or French-related words, are probably to be found in his Sonnet, “On Seeing a Piece of Our Artillery Brought Into Action”:

 Yet, for men's sakes whom thy vast malison
 Must wither innocent of enmity (vv 9-10) 

Here, “malison”, for “curse”, comes from old French (where it is a variant of maleiçon), while “imprecations” in the first stanza stems from Latin and is similar to its French cognate, which is rather more common in literary French (with which Owen grew familiar thanks to his friendship with the great imprécateur Laurent Tailhade) than in English.[1]

However, this praise of the cannon in sophisticated, French-sounding English is but a decoy for the final cursing he directs at war. French thus becomes an element of irony, such as the pastiche of Biblical speech and the use of archaisms. It should be noted that the last line,

May God curse thee, and cut thee from our soul!

not only is a shining example of a ten-words pentameter, but also one where every single word comes from Middle or Old English, and then from Proto-Germanic languages, without a single Latin influence. Nothing patriotic there, naturally; this difference only emphasizes the abrupt fall of long-worded, crafted pentameters into this clanging, crude final curse.[2] It seems nonetheless noteworthy that from a French-shaped presentation, the curse turns out to be absolutely not French as it erupts in a most English way.

            The hypothesis of every supposed French imaginary being actually erased under a British imaginary thus seems more acceptable. Any direct influence of French poetry can be equally disputed: for instance, when Dominic Hibberd perceives Verlaine’s influence in « On a Dream » (Hibberd 41). If Owen has actually transcribed « Mon rêve familier », it may be the general tonality that might be reminiscent of Verlaine, for direct imitation is definitely not obvious:

It is hard to notice any kind of direct correspondence here – I have translated Verlaine’s sonnet, if clumsily, rather literally in order to highlight how little and vaguely Owen borrows from the French. The only rough equivalent I have been able to notice is the solitary woman’s tears (doubly underlined here), although they are set in two totally distinct systems of sadness: the woman in Owen’s sonnet comes dishevelled in a dream to seek solace on his side, while Verlaine’s speaker is the one who wishes for the oneiric comfort this polar opposite of a woman, soothing and motherly, could bring. In Owen’s sonnet, her loneliness makes her need a man, while in Verlaine’s it is he who erects her as a lonely, Platonic lover figure he is desperately in need of. It might be true that both evoke a dream revelatory of a lonely, masculine existence; this similarity, present in so many poems haunted by dreams, somehow falls short of demonstrating a concrete translingual influence.

One could arguably see Owen’s attempt at speech, bringing the feverish realization that the visit was but a dream, as inspired by different moments at the end of Verlaine’s octave and sestet, although there is no such consequential, Orpheus-inspired logic in the French sonnet.

Besides the differing stanzas layout, the rhyming pattern also differs from one sonnet to the other, Verlaine’s being distinctly French:

• Owen’s “On a Dream”:                       ABBAABBA CDECDE
• Verlaine “Mon Rêve familier”            ABBA  ABBA  CCDEDE

The French sonnet originates from the mid-16^th century, around the time of Surrey and of the first appearances of what will become the Elizabethan sonnet: it is one where the sestet starts with a distich. French studies quite commonly distinguish between two varieties of French sonnet: when the sestet ends with enclosed rhymes, it is named à la Marot (from the probable introducer of the form in French) and when it ends with crossed rhymes, it is à la Peletier, from Peletier du Mans, mentor and companion of the Pléiade poets and the first to consistently propose this scheme.

This specific sonnet is quite often overlooked by Anglophone criticism, or roughly categorized as continental or Italian, even though this feature is thoroughly avoided by Petrarch and the Italians, as noticed by Jacques Roubaud (Roubaud) or John Fuller (Fuller 3-4). Owen may not have been familiar with these subtle pattern characteristics of the sonnet, although one may assume that a poet is generally aware of the effects of the rhyme. I have here tried to assess precisely whether his rhyme schemes prove any kind of influence from the French form.

A rhyme scheme recension: the prevalence of the Elizabethan sonnet

The first column addresses the typographical disposition, as common during Owen’s life – with different stanzas separated by a blank line.

I have underlined the occurrences of a final Elizabethan distich and doubly underlined those of a French sestet. The comparison reveals the overwhelming presence of the English distich, compared to the French one. There are five of the latter, if only two corresponding to a common French pattern (“The Sleeping Beauty” and “Happiness”, which mixes an Elizabethan octave with a French sestet), as the succession of distiches is neither common nor much sought out throughout the history of the French form. This rare appearance of a clear French, Marot-style sonnet is quite striking and may lead to a new hypothesis: as “The Sleeping Beauty” was written during the earliest stages of the war, while Owen was still living in the South-West of France, he may somehow have been influenced by his readings and the language he was hearing all day long.

So the poet quite likely knew about the French form, and – one may assume – chose not to use it after 1914. The reasons I could propose for such a tiny, though not insignificant, renouncement, could be either a desire for formal diversity or Owen’s return to an English frame of mind, corresponding with his enrolment in the Artists’ Rifles. His return into English society and his defence of patriotism would then be manifest through an adherence to the English sonnet formal canon, or at least its major defining feature: the final distich.

This allegiance, unsurprising on Owen’s part, is not straightforward. Not only does the poet considerably vary his rhyme schemes – 24 out of 31 indisputable sonnets – but he also tries unconventional, if not experimental, formal varieties, such as “Futility” or, famously and arguably, “Dulce et Decorum Est”. Within all this diversity, the poet lets only one in twenty undisputable sonnets espouse the canonical Elizabethan form, both in terms of rhyme (three quatrains of different crossed rhymes followed by a final distich) and typography: “My shy hand”. Seven others follow the Elizabethan rhyme scheme, although not its formal layout on the page, four (“When late I viewed the gardens of rich men…”, “The Peril of Love”, “Sonnet (To a Child)”, “The Fates”) divided between octave and sestet and three (“To Eros”, “Music”, “To my Friend (with an Identity Disc)”) between quatrains and sestet. “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, one of Owen’s most noteworthy sonnets, comes very close to an Elizabethan structure (with a third quatrain of enclosed rhymes).

All in all, the Elizabethan final distich permeates the rhyme structure of a majority of his sonnets: 19 out of 31 clear sonnets. It is as though, by renouncing to set the last distich apart, Owen was trying not to appear visibly English, while two thirds of his sonnets still end with this specific feature of English poetry. For all his complex relationship with his native land, Owen still dies under its colours and still writes using its forms, to which he pays homage in his Shakespeare-influenced sonnet “How do I love thee” – obviously ending on an Elizabethan distich.

Though the hermeneutics of form are always tricky, especially when it comes to systematising an interpretation, I will nonetheless propose an interpretation of this feature of the sonnet. I have wondered whether Owen drew on the sententious tone that this English specificity usually conveys in order to better achieve obvious conclusions to his sonnets. This rather subjective assessment has led me to believe that six sonnets (“1914”, “Storm”, “To my Friend (with an Identity Disc)”, “The End”, arguably “The Peril of Love” and “Anthem for Doomed Youth”) out of nineteen do use the final distich in some kind of funereal, epitaph-like closing sentence. This proportion is not insignificant and tends to reveal Owen’s poetic inspirations, from “England one by one had fled to France” to be buried “under France” (words from “Smile, smile, smile”). Yet, at the same time, this relatively small number tends to confirm the variety of Owen’s aesthetics, leading to love (many final distiches are devoted to love) and in the end, to life.

Conclusion

In a ground-breaking paper, Peter Howarth shows that the War Poets’ pretention to realism does not mean they do not use classical forms, nor experiment with rhythm and form in a sometimes conspicuous way. The critic, as a keen student of the meaning of form, underlines how it was considered as a reflection of a cosmological order: “what we see in much First World War verse is the struggle of older forms with a reality that cannot be ‘contained’ by them, and with which twentieth-century poetics spent much of its time trying to catch up” (Howarth 53).

This stimulating assertion would need to be discussed within a broader frame of reflection about the sonnet, as in the 19^th century the form was adapted to a new world and thought order, from Wordsworth and Shelley in England to Baudelaire and Verlaine in France. Nevertheless, Howarth is probably right about Wilfred Owen: as I have tried to suggest here, Owen’s use of the sonnet both reflects the disordered, un-conventional world of War, which turns out to take place in France, and it inserts itself in a heritage that is mostly British – in layout and sounds – and has little to do with France.

Thus, the proto-modernist Owen is, from a British perspective, all but an orphan – here is a poet who discusses overtly with Keats and Shelley, who mentions Shakespeare and Spenser and who is influenced by Yeats and Tennyson. He might have something of the exile, though, or even of the orphelin of French literature, an orphelin in the adopted land where he was bound to die: long unable to either abundantly draw from it, or be fully recognized there – a fact I hope this volume will help to change.

Works cited

Bonnefoy, Yves. L’autre langue à portée de voix. Paris, Seuil, 2013.

Cyr, Marc D. “Formal Subversion in Wilfred Owen’s ‘Hospital Barge’ ”, Style 28.1 (Spring 1994), 6.

Fuller, John. The Sonnet. London, Methuen, 1980.

Hibberd, Dominic. Owen the Poet. Athens (Georgia), The University of Georgia Press, 1986.

Howarth, Peter. “Poetic Form and the First World War”, The Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War. Santanu Das ed., New York, Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp 51-65.

Houbedine, Anne-Marie (dir.). L’Imaginaire linguistique. Paris, L’Harmattan, 2002.

Knowles, Owen. « Introduction », Owen, Wilfred. The Poems of Wilfred Owen. Ware, Wordsworth Classics, 1994.

Owen, Wilfred. Collected Letters. London, Oxford University Press, 1967.

– – – The Complete Poems and Fragments. London, Chatto & Windus, the Hogarth Press, Oxford University Press, 1983.

Roubaud, Jacques. Quasi-cristaux, « Description du sonnet français, 1801-1998 ». Paris, Martine Aboucaya et Yvon Lambert, 2013.

Sassoon, Siegfried. The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon. Mineola (NY), Dover, 2004.

Verlaine, Paul. Poèmes Saturniens (1866), in Fêtes Galantes, Romances sans paroles, précédé de Poèmes Saturniens. Paris, Gallimard, 2010 (my translation).

[1] Owen uses a similar French-inspired world with “orisons” in “Anthem for a Doomed Youth”, with the same aim of distancing its poetry from the lauding register.

[2] One will find in this issue a paper by Gilles Couderc, containing a more detailed list of the apparitions, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, of words or wordings influenced or inspired by the French language.

Thomas Vuong is an Associate Researcher at Université Sorbonne – Paris-Nord, Pléiade. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature. He studied how the sonnet form functions as a major touchstone for poetics and the function of poetry in Western Europe, during the Second World War. His other sonnet-related fields of investigation are XXth-century poetry in France, England and Italy or in Black American poetry. He has also published papers in Translation Studies, especially about Petrarch’s influence or about the concept of imaginaries of translation.

LAURE-HÉLÈNE ANTHONY-GERROLDT

Keywords 
Wilfred Owen, Spring Offensive, First World War, War poetry, Border crossings, French landscape, France, Sensuousness, Touch, Romantic Poetry, Conflict

Abstract
Being the poet’s last completed piece, “Spring Offensive” makes France Wilfred Owen’s last poetic landscape. The article explores the ways in which “Spring Offensive” continuously crosses and blurs the borders between the French landscape and the poet’s English heritage; it also emphasizes the sensuousness of the landscape and of the war experience, so that the bodies of the soldiers and nature fuse and interact. “Spring Offensive” thus comes to reflect Owen’s search for balance, a search of which the French landscape becomes the natural yet symbolic representation.

Résumé
« Spring Offensive » étant le dernier poème terminé d’Owen, la France devient le dernier paysage poétique de l’œuvre. Cet article étudie la façon dont « Spring Offensive » traverse et dissout les frontières qui séparent le paysage français et l’héritage anglais du poète ; le poème, parce qu’il se concentre sur le caractère sensuel du paysage et de l’expérience de guerre, permet également la fusion du corps des soldats avec celui de la nature. Ainsi, le poème reproduit la recherche d’équilibre de Wilfred Owen : le paysage français en devient la représentation naturelle et symbolique. 

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In his recent biography of Wilfred Owen, Guy Cuthbertson observed that if Shropshire was the land of A.E. Housman, the land of Wilfred Owen, which he calls “Owenshire,” would have most likely been located in France (Cuthbertson, 29). France is just as central to Owen’s poethood as England. He grew up in Great Britain where he saw the landscapes and Roman ruins that inspired most of his early poetry. He then lived in France before and throughout the war; his experience on the French Western Front became the inspiration for many of his war poems, which are generally acclaimed as his best and most accomplished pieces. “Spring Offensive” is one such poem: it recalls a real offensive Owen survived in April 1917, but also stands out as Owen’s last completed piece, which in turn makes France the last Owenian poetic landscape. Aside from being Owen’s last completed piece, Santanu Das argues that the significance of “Spring Offensive” lies in its truthfulness (Das, 164) – Owen neither lies about the exhilarating sensations of “going over the top,” which he describes in his letters from France and in the poem, nor does he reject his previous political commitments and beliefs about the war. This truthfulness is reinforced by the sensuousness of the poem, which especially relies on touch and movement to recreate the experience of battle without glamorizing it.

I would therefore like to contend that in “Spring Offensive” the French landscape becomes the natural yet symbolic representation of Owen’s inner struggles and search for balance. The poem maintains a delicate equilibrium between sensations and abstractions and reveals a certain degree of harmony and unity between the soldiers, the French landscape and the poet himself but also unites Owen’s English heritage with his French experience of the war. To expose this argument, I will focus on two main aspects of “Spring Offensive”: border crossing and sensuousness. The opening of the poem blurs the boundaries between the French landscape of war and descriptions of traditional English landscapes. This first border crossing leads to other crossings that become apparent when focusing on Owen’s use of the senses. The poet’s focus on the five senses, but also on movement, makes the soldiers’ bodies interact with nature, which helps explain how Owen creates a sense of balance between sensations and abstraction, but also between a heroic representation of the soldiers and the voice of anger and protest he is famous for. 

Crossing borders in “Spring Offensive”: from the pastoral landscapes of English poetry to the French landscape of war

France is described throughout much of Owen’s poetry and inspired so many of his poems that Guy Cuthbertson locating Owenshire in France accurately places the essence of the poet’s work. The landscape of war is the battered landscape of France – a landscape that bears the traces of battle and reflects the effects of the war on the soldiers’ bodies and minds. In “The Show,” the land is diseased and old, “pitted with great pocks and scabs of plague” (l.5), as if the war itself were an infectious disease afflicting the world. The comparison to the plague and small pock accurately depicts the shell craters that defaced the landscape, but also anchors the horrors of war in the human body, turning the landscape into a metaphor for the soldiers’ physical suffering. The French landscape of war is also one of slime, mud, rain and snow. “Exposure” equates the endlessness of the war with natural impressions of lassitude; the soldiers “only know war lasts, rain soaks, and clouds sag stormy” (l.12), as if the whole world had become a never-ending day of rain, abridging all hope for light and peace. The only reference to grass seems far remote in “Exposure,” and appears to be a characteristic of England rather than of France. The soldiers, waiting in trenches in the snow, can only dream of the “grassier ditches” and of the “blossoms trickling where the blackbird fusses” they must have once known in England (l.23-24). Again, the landscape of France is described as a battered place of danger and agony, a place much closer to Hell than to the pastoral landscapes of England and of English poetry. 

Yet, in naming the land of Owen’s poetry Owenshire, Guy Cuthbertson also calls up Wilfred Owen’s English heritage, as if Owenshire could stand alongside Oxfordshire, Derbyshire or Yorkshire. Doing so, Cuthbertson merges the France of Owen’s poetry with England and blurs the boundaries that separate the two countries. This, in turn, evokes Rupert Brooke’s famous lines from “The Soldier”: 

    If I should die, think only this of me: 
    That there’s some corner of a foreign field
    That is for ever England. There shall be
    In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; 
    A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, 
    Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam; 
    A body of England’s, breathing English air, 
    Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. (1-8) 

Like the soldier Brooke describes in the sonnet, Owen grew up breathing the air of England, enjoying its rivers and a sun that had not yet lost its nurturing power, contrary to the sun of France the poet appeals to revive the dying soldier in “Futility.” The poet also died in a foreign field, during the crossing of the Oise-Sambre canal, and so became a “body of England’s” buried deep in the soil of France. The borders separating the two countries therefore seem to merge into Owenshire, a land that is a mixture of English heritage and French experience. 

“Spring Offensive” is one of the poems that best represents Owenshire. Its composition was prompted by a real offensive Owen survived in April 1917, which makes France the inspiration for the piece. Jon Stallworthy, however, dates the beginning of the composition to July 1918, when Owen lived in Scarborough, England, and explains the last revisions to the poem were made in France in September 1918. The very writing of the poem therefore crossed the borders of France and England, but still marks France out as Owen’s last poetic landscape. Yet, there is no clear, direct mention of France in the poem, as if France had somehow been abstracted or distilled into poetry. In fact, Owen rarely mentions France in his poetry: aside from a passing reference in “Futility” and another in “Smile, smile, smile,” France is not named. The location of the poems is however hinted at in other pieces, especially in some of Owen’s titles, such as “At a Calvary near the Ancre,” which places the poem in Picardy or “Le Christianisme” and “A Terre,” which both have French titles. Still, to a reader completely unaware of the context in which “Spring Offensive” was created, the first few lines can sound familiar: 

    Halted against the shade of a last hill
    They, and eased of pack-loads, were at ease; 
    And leaning on the nearest chest or knees
    Carelessly slept. 
                                           But many there stood still
    To face the stark blank sky beyond the ridge, 
    Knowing their feet had come to the end of the world. 
    Marvelling they stood, and watched the long grass swirled
    By the May breeze, murmurous with wasp and midge; (1-9) 

The lines conjure up the descriptions of pastoral England that shape so many of the spring poems of the late 18th and early 19th century celebrating either the month of May or the beauty and fertility of the season. For example, while the speaker of William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written in Early Spring” sits “reclined” in the “breezy air” (l.2, l. 18), Thomas Gray’s “Ode on the Spring” lets its speaker hear the “busy murmur” of insects (l. 27). These two examples echo “the May breeze, murmurous with wasp and midge” and the verb “halted against” (l.9, l.1) of “Spring Offensive,” making it sound as if the war could be forgotten for an instant and as though the soldiers were standing on the border between England, their feet still deep in the green grass where insects buzz and fly, and the torn landscapes of France. 

Even closer to the landscape descriptions of “Spring Offensive” are elements from John Keats’s early poem “I stood tip-toe upon a little hill”.^[1] The poem opens with the lines “I stood tip-toe upon a little hill, / The air was cooling, and so very still” so that the soldiers of “Spring Offensive” almost seem to mimic Keats’s speaker’s pose. Inspired by the sights of spring, the speaker of “I stood tip-toe” later describes “a bush of May flowers with the bees about them” where “ardent marigolds! / Dry up the moisture from [their] golden lids” (l.29, l. 48-49), much like the buttercups that stick to the men’s boots in Owen’s poem. In his new biography of Wilfred Owen, Dominic Hibberd comments on the composition of the landscape of “Spring Offensive” and notes that the poet relies on his English heritage, both poetic and personal. “Long ago,” Hibberd writes, “in his early enthusiasm for Keats, Wilfred had hoped for a vision like those granted to ‘old dreamers on May Morn’, and his last finished poem is set in a May, Shropshire-like landscape, where Wordsworthian nature is a moral teacher” (Hibberd, 2019). Sleepiness, the month of May, a gentle breeze, long grass and the song of insects buzzing in the speaker’s ears are indeed so many traditional motifs of pastoral and Romantic poetry that Owen draws on to write the description of the landscape of “Spring Offensive”. Nature even becomes a sort of moral teacher in the poem, as the branches hold on to the men’s boots to try and keep them from going into battle. Wilfred Owen’s biographers Dominic Hibberd and Jon Stallworthy also note that the buttercups he mentions line 15 are a memory from a walk the poet took in Shropshire with his brother Harold when they were teenagers. Stallworthy collected Harold Owen’s words; his brother would have then remarked: “Harold’s boots are blessed with gold,” (Stallworthy, 44),^[2] a phrase the poet takes up again in close association with the buttercups of “Spring Offensive” as he writes: “where the buttercups / Had blessed with gold their slow boots coming up” (l. 15-16). Even though Owen’s poem actually takes place in France, it therefore contains memories of the poet’s British childhood and elements of traditional English and British poetry he assimilated over the years. 

Yet, the landscape of the introduction is also unmistakably French, with its buttercups, warm fields and grassy hills that easily let the reader picture the arable lands of France. After the first few lines, the landscape gradually becomes even more French as it comes to bear the marks of a war that never really touched the British countryside. The landscapes of the Western Front, in the northeast of France and Belgium especially, are indeed characterised by mud, slime, shell holes and fire, and though the landscape of “Spring Offensive” is not pinned as specifically French, the descriptions are clearly inspired by Owen’s experience of the French Western Front and of the trenches. In his letters home, the poet writes about France, the villages he passes and the Front line. Writing to his mother on 16 January 1917, Owen describes No Man’s Land: 

After that we came to where the trenches had been blown flat out and had to go over the top. It was of course dark, too dark, and the ground was not mud, not sloppy mud, but an octopus of sucking clay, 3, 4, and 5 feet deep, relieved only by craters full of water. Men have been known to drown in them. Many stuck in the mud & only got on by leaving their waders, equipment, and in some cases their clothes. High explosives were dropping all around out, and machine guns spluttered every few minutes. But it was so dark that even the German flares did not reveal us. (Owen, Letters 427)

After 1916, in the poet’s correspondence, France is often limited to No Man’s Land and the colours that best describe it: fire or blood red, mud brown and black. In the poems, as in the letters, the green Romantic scenery of leaves, branches, and trees gives way to a scene where the “sky [burns],” the small flowers collect blood and the hills open like the gates of Hell. One of the main characteristics of the French landscape in Owen’s poetry is indeed its resemblance with Hell. “Apologia Pro Poemate Meo” represents the war as “the sorrowful dark of hell” (l. 30); “Cramped in that Funnelled Hole” has the soldiers lie in “one of the many mouths of Hell” (l.5). Upon seeing the privates plagued with shell-shock, the speaker of “Mental Cases” wonders whether he and his interlocutor “walk hell,” calling the soldiers themselves “these hellish” (l.9), while the speaker of “Strange Meeting,” having seemingly escaped from the battlefield, finds himself standing in Hell as well. In or out of battle, the men appear to be forever trapped in the nightmarish underworld that France has become. 

Even when it is not referred to openly, Owen describes a realm of fire, lime and pain which are all characteristics that poets and writers use to describe Hell in poetry and in the Bible. In the New Testament, for instance, Matthew declares: “So it shall be at the end of the world: the angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the just, /And shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew, 13:49-50). The lines evoke Owen’s men standing at “the end of the world” (l.6) and the “fiends and flames” (l.41) of “Spring Offensive.” Owen’s choice of words is also reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno; in Canto XVI, for example, the speaker exclaims “Ah me! What wounds I saw upon their limbs, / Recent and ancient by the flames burnt it! / It pains me still but to remember it” (l.10-12), which recalls both Owen’s “I try not to remember these things now” in “The Sentry” (l.29) and the gassed soldier of “Dulce et Decorum Est” who is “flound’ring like a man in fire or lime” (l.12). Similarly, the senses of the soldiers in “Insensibility” have been dulled by “some scorching cautery of battle” (l.28) and the men in “Greater Love” carry the burden of war “through flame and hail” (l.24). These references are, of course, not specifically French in nature, but they are a few examples of the way Owen transforms the French landscape into a physical experience and representation of Hell. Once combined with the descriptions of the battered, torn and diseased land of agony battles have turned fields into, the image of France at war is complete and, as Guy Cuthbertson contends, Owen then finds himself “in a new territory” where “familiar France ha[s] become strange” (Cuthbertson, 167). The France the poet had known, loved and described in his letters from Bordeaux and Bagnères-de-Bigorre, with its “rich leafage” and its “hydrangeas (hortensia) with purple inflorescences” was gone (Owen, Letters 270). The several pictures of the landscape that Owen disseminates throughout his poetry then seem to all build towards the creation of “Spring Offensive,” a poem where the soldiers eventually “enter Hell/ And there [out-fiend] all its fiends and flames” as they run into battle (l.40-41), where they face “the hot blast and fury of hell’s upsurge” (l. 35) and where the earth breaks open into holes.

The soldiers, who have so far seemed to stand in the English countryside, in the same landscape their dreams take them to in “Exposure”, have now set foot in the hellish French landscape of war. This is made all the clearer in the fourth stanza of the poem: the men only come into contact with the violence of war after “they topped the hill, and raced together / Over an open stretch of herb and heather / Exposed. And instantly the whole sky burned” (l.27-29). The adverb “instantly” reinforces the impression of a changing atmosphere, as if going over the hill meant stepping into new territory. Yet, this does not come as a surprise to the reader. The violent context that inspired the poem is hinted at from the very first lines through the use of the phrases like “the last hill” (l.1), “the stark blank sky” (l.6) or “the end of the world” (l.7). Death and impending doom have infected the land even before the assault begins. The “last hill”, as French as the context makes it, therefore really seems to become a symbolic frontier between two worlds, between the Romantic, pastoral poise and beauty of an immemorial English landscape and the overwhelming reality of the French Western Front, where the war and death itself pervade every aspect of the scenery, even when one has not yet gone into battle. 

The line between the two worlds, however, is never quite so clear as it seems – the French landscape of war and the Romantic motifs remain in a strange state of equilibrium. Just as the wartime context is hinted at from the beginning of “Spring Offensive”, the pastoral elements that make up most of the first part of the poem never quite disappear either. Instead of fighting men and bombs, the soldiers appear to be at war with nature itself. Line 30, the earth “[sets] sudden cups” to collect the soldiers’ blood; the cups could be shell holes, but they are also reminiscent of the buttercups that had blessed the men’s boots earlier. Similarly, the green slopes against which they once rested open up to bury the bodies of fighting men in revenge for their assault on the land. As the offensive ends, the soldiers return to the place they had first come from. Lines 44 and 45 read “And crawling slowly back, have by degrees / Regained peaceful air in wonder –”, as though the men were emerging from the desolation and violence of the French Western Front back into the pre-war pastoral world of Romantic poetry. The boundaries between the two worlds are crossed in order to create something new: “Spring Offensive” is neither a Romantic nature poem, nor is it a poem of pure protest against the war. Already, the border crossings at the heart of the poem and the representation of the French landscape come to reflect Owen’s search for balance – balance between his English heritage and the French context of battle, but also between the voice of his anger and protest – heard in the violent descriptions of war and the comparison to Hell – and his search for beauty and healing, found in the pastoral references and the sympathetic, loving description of the men’s interaction at the beginning of the poem. However, “Spring Offensive” does not only show a crossing of borders between British and French landscapes or between Owen’s experience on the French Western Front and his Romantic and poetic heritage; it also emphasizes the sensuousness of the landscape and of the war experience, so that the bodies of the soldiers and nature fuse and interact.

The sensuousness of the French landscape: fusing bodies and nature, reflecting the reality of war

Throughout the poem, Wilfred Owen calls attention to all of the senses. “Spring Offensive” first of all generates a mental image for its readers, the creation of which is reinforced by the fact that the poem begins in medias res and that the soldiers are either lying or standing still, as if we were watching a picture of soldiers waiting to go to battle. The pictoriality of the poem is also highlighted by the direct and indirect use of colours. The long grass evokes the colour green, the sky is either white or burning, suggesting the colour red, the buttercups and the sun are “golden” and the redness of blood eventually mixes with the colour of the earth and the green of the grass. The use of colours is especially significant in war poetry and literature of the First World War since, as Randall Stevenson remarks in Literature and the Great War, colour consciousness helps highlight the movements from the confidence in pastoral conventions to the realisation that they were in fact inadequate in confronting the violence of the war (Stevenson, 149). The colours of “Spring Offensive” reflect this idea – and Owen’s letters from France –, as the green of the seemingly pastoral first lines comes into contrast with the redness of blood and fire that characterises the war. 

Yet, colours do not simply emphasize the contrast between the world of war and the pastoral, or between the violent reality of the present and the idealisation of the past, they also contribute to crossing the borders between abstraction and sensation. As Dani Cavallaro explains, “many colours have been described as rough or sticky, others as smooth and uniform, so that one feels inclined to stroke them. […] Some colours appear soft (rose madder), others hard (cobalt green, blue-green oxide)” (Cavallaro, 61). This remark, which results from interviews with synesthete painters, not only reveals the synaesthetic value of colour, but its emotional and cognitive import. As Yeshayahu Shen has demonstrated, the way we conceive of abstract notions such as love, for example, is usually expressed metaphorically through the use of more concrete terms that are more readily apprehensible by the brain (Shen, 178-179). This is also true of colour, which we qualify as thick, rough or soft – adjectives that relate to the sense of touch – to get a better grasp of the emotion and sensation that we get upon seeing a colour. Applied to “Spring Offensive”, these two conceptions show that in opposing the green of grass, a colour culturally associated with hope and nature, to red, which Western cultures tend to associate with anger and violence even outside war contexts, Owen uses sensation as a springboard for the reader to feel the emotion linked with the war and then to better grasp the abstract idea of conflict, combat and violence. It almost seems as if the French trench landscape had been Owen’s raw material, a material which he then distilled into poetry and into a more abstract and universalised representation of war that is no longer French per se. Rather, the specifics of topology and geography are erased and give way to a physical and poetic immersion into the world of War (of any war) quite reminiscent of one of the remarks made by the speaker of “Strange Meeting”: “I mean the truth untold, / The pity of war, the pity war distilled” (l.24-25). In “Spring Offensive”, France is abstracted and what remains is the sensory experience of war and of its landscapes. Yet the focus on sensation is also typical of trench warfare on the French and Belgian Western front. As Santanu Das explains, “this sensuous awareness of the surrounding world marks the experience of the trenches” (Das 74): trench landscapes are characterised by the way they feel and not by their location. The colours additionally contribute to making nature and humanity fuse and interact when the men’s blood becomes one with the earth or when the red colour of blood is reflected in the burning colour of the sky (l. 29-31). 

Similarly, the land is filled with the buzzing sound of insects, a buzzing that is slowly replaced by the stuttering of bullets in the air. Already, the worlds of nature and mankind seem to coalesce as the music of both insects and bullets comes to life in the [s] and [z] alliterations that run throughout the poem and give continuity to its language as they erase the differences between the natural elements and the man-made objects of destruction. The sun, which acts as a figure of love and embrace lines 25 and 26 and that could awake soldiers, “even in France” (l.4) in “Futility”, and the white sky both turn into the cause of death for many of the men that go into battle. Again, and contrary to “Futility,” “Spring Offensive” removes direct references to the real geographic location of the attack. No shells are mentioned in the poem – the reader only knows that “the whole sky burned / With fury against them” and that they “went up / On the hot blast and fury of hell’s upsurge” (l.29-30, l. 34-35). These lines convey a strong visual image of a red, blazing sky and of areas of cracked, cratered ground that very well represent the common idea we have of fury, of hell or of war. Yet, there is no fury in the sky or in the ground – only invisible shells that parallel the “unseen bullets” of line 35. The repetition of the noun “fury” and the absence of specific references to the Western Front or to France relocate the violence and destruction of man-made war in nature, thus reinforcing the blending of boundaries between the soldiers and the natural world, and casting the war itself as a war between man and nature, or as a fight between lovers, which in turn begins to voice Owen’s anger and protest. The voice of the poet and his fury blend with Nature’s anger at the loss and desolation the war entails, thus striking a balance between the sensation and emotion of fury and the abstract idea we make of it. 

Sight and sound, despite the strength of the emotions and sensations they convey, are not, however, the senses Owen relies on the most to show the interaction between the French landscape and the soldiers and between sensations and abstractions. As Santanu Das has remarked, the poem begins in medias res and lays emphasis on movement from the very first line. The verb “halted” indeed implies movement and contact; it makes the bodies of men seem to move in slow motion, which reminds us of the corporeality of war and places the body as an object of perception within the landscape (Das, 153). Opening the poem on the verb “halted” accentuates the pictoriality of the poem, but also forces us to envision the soldiers as bodies about to move and presses us to watch them move as well. The landscape of France “Spring Offensive” is set in is not so much French as it is a moving, feeling, breathing land, a place seemingly imbued with its own sensations and feelings. The trees “breathe”, the grass “swirl[s]” as in a dance and the buttercups, like Nature’s priests, give the soldiers their blessing. The focus on touch and movement sensualises France, but it actually humanizes it as well because touch is the most body-related sense of all. In Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, Susan Stewart writes that “[o]f all the senses, touch is most linked to emotion and feeling. To be “touched” or “moved” by words or things implies the process of identification and separation by which we apprehend the world aesthetically. […] [T]actile perception involves perception of our own bodily state as we take in what is outside that state” (Stewart, 162). 

The sense of touch, then, is the sense through which we become able to understand the reality of our own bodies, of another person’s body, but also of the separation between ourselves and the outside world. Touch, movement and observation of another body’s movements help us understand emotion, but the body, because it moves and experiences pain and pleasure as a sort of inner touch, is also the site of all human emotion. In focusing on movement and touch, Owen therefore deeply humanises both the landscape and the soldiers. The distance between the men and nature almost disappears, which also reduces the distance between the reader and the poem. Touch, movement and emotion facilitate empathetic identification. As Pierre-Louis Patoine argues, a profusion of textual somaesthetic sensations gradually prepares the reader’s body to feel the emotions and sensations of literary characters empathetically (Patoine, 254). The empathy thus created partly erases the distance between the reader and the text because unlike sound or sight, touch and movement require contact. This characteristic of touch and movement, both of which are somaesthetic sensations, therefore makes it possible to read “Spring Offensive” not only as crossing the borders between man and nature, or between Owen’s English heritage and his French experience of the war, but also as an attempt to bridge the gap that separates the reader from the text and to increase the reader’s sympathy for the soldiers’ fate.  

In the second stanza, the branches, bushes and flowers move and even act humanely; their gestures are those of a man or a woman holding a loved one back so he does not leave or so he can be kept away from danger. The use of the verbs “clutch” and “cling” line 18 communicates both the painful movement of nature towards the soldiers and its desperation – no word is uttered in the stanza, but the feeling of the hand-like branches on the soldiers’ legs is one of supplication. The sensation is one of entanglement and of being torn, both physically and mentally. Once again, though the scene is set in France and the Western front is recognizable, the main function of the landscape is not to locate the war, but to act as a projection of the soldiers’ inner struggles between love of nature, desire to rest, and military duty instead. The reader is made to feel that the soldiers do not want to betray the nature that so generously nurtured them by fighting and destroying, but that they must fight anyway. This also leads to sympathetic identification with the soldiers, and with nature. In fact, nature itself appears to sympathise with the soldiers, an impression which, again, is encouraged by the repeated use of sensations in the poem. Daniel Hipp makes a similar remark about Owen’s depiction of the sky in the first stanza, line 12: 

The emptiness perceived in “the stark blank sky” lends it an unsympathetic attitude toward them and predicts their deaths. But “the sky’s mysterious glass” is perceived to have “[f]earfully flashed”, a description which makes the sky itself the fearful party. This fear, attributed to the sky in this line, is more likely reflective of the men’s projected fears, but the fluidity of agency in these contrasting lines about the sky points to the element of sympathy that for Owen is the redemptive force of the poem and the war experience. (Hipp, 101)

Though it does not concentrate on Owen’s use of sensations in “Spring Offensive”, Hipp’s analysis of the poem and of the sky comes to the same conclusions as the exploration of sight, sound, touch and movement above: the association of the subject “mysterious glass” with the verbal group “[f]earfully flashed” connects sensations, feelings and the abstract idea of mystery. Similarly, the line lays emphasis on the projection of the soldiers’ feelings and emotions onto the landscape and on nature’s sympathetic response to these, making the French landscape a representation of the soldiers’ inner struggles and of Owen’s. Thus, despite voicing his protest and anger towards the war – towards the violence and the absurdity of war – Owen also shows that nature and the relationships the men share offer a chance for redemption, but also for sympathy and for beauty proving that equilibrium and healing can still be attained in the midst of war. 

Touch and movement also carry and evoke emotion in a more visceral way than sight or hearing would have, which subsequently leads to the blending of emotion, sensation and abstraction together. In the lines in which nature acts as a loving figure to the soldiers, sadness mixes with the sensations felt in nature and helps us grasp the concepts of war and peace that appear throughout the poem more fully. Even the offensive starts without any visual or auditive cue; instead of flags or bugles, a thrilled word is spoken line 19, the reaction to which is emotional and physical movement. The body and the soul of the soldiers move together and are equally affected upon hearing the word – they come together and are bound (“begird”, l.20) and become tense (“tighten”, l.21) as they prepare to act. Yet, it seems the body and soul react not so much to the word they hear as they do to the trembling, nervous movement and ecstatic emotion conveyed by the verb “thrills”. The line goes even further in expressing the strange balance of feelings and sensations that the soldiers experience before going into battle: the “little word” that “thrills” line 19 is like a “cold gust” – it both excites and frightens. In that sense, Santanu Das is right in stating that in “Spring Offensive”, “Owen reconceptualises poetry as a testimony to the senses” (Das 163) and that the significance of the poem lies in its truthfulness: Owen does not deny that there is something exhilarating about going into battle – physically, the experience is a complex mixture of adrenaline rushes that can make one feel superhuman (a word Owen himself uses line 43) and of fear and disgust, but this truthfulness to experience is only made possible by the heightened sensuousness of the poem. We could also go further and say that Owen does not simply reconceptualise poetry as a testimony to the senses, but that in so doing, he also reimagines France and the trenches, condensing them into a physical, sensuous, truthful and perhaps dislocated experience of warfare. 

Between lines 27 and 40, “Spring Offensive” entirely immerses the reader in the sensory experience of the war. The French landscape becomes all movement, touch and pain. What to an outsider would have remained a very abstract idea of war comes to be experienced through the senses and therefore bursts into reality, though the lack of topographical details keeps the balance between abstraction and sensation intact. Focus on sensation intensifies the reading experience because it favours empathetic identification, but also because it blurs the boundaries between what belongs in the work of art and what happens in real life, an idea that Owen might have inherited from Keats, which again contributes to the crossing of borders the poem exemplifies. Writing his brothers about the painting Death on the Pale Horse, John Keats had indeed famously remarked: “But there is nothing to be intense upon; no woman one feels mad to kiss; no face swelling into reality”.^[3] The poet’s words suggest that for a work of art to move the spectator, it must come into contact with him or her, make the spectator strongly feel – by way of the senses and of feelings – art interact with reality. The interaction between the reader’s reality and the work of art are themselves a sort of border crossing that partially dissolves the bounds that separate real life sensations from the sensations displayed in the poem or the painting under observation. Keats’s statement has since been corroborated by neuroscientific and linguistic research on sensation, and more specifically on mirror neurons. As Paolo Della Putta puts it: “According to the Embodied Semantics paradigm, linguistic concepts are represented in the brain within partially overlapping neural substrates recruited to enact and experience the action a word refers to (Della Putta, 21), meaning that upon reading action words, words referring to movement, the brain both processes the word linguistically and somehow recreates the impression of movement within the brain. The regions of the brain that would activate upon actually doing the action of the movement-verb also activate upon reading it. 

In Owen’s poem, the use of verbs like “open”, “chasm”, “steepen”, “run”, or “plunge” linguistically reproduces the perpetual movement of both the soldiers and nature. The sensations of speed and pain that accompany these actions are passed on by the repeated use of guttural and sibilant sounds respectively, but also by the choice of monosyllabic words, which are quicker to pronounce than their polysyllabic counterparts. These sensory aspects of “Spring Offensive” thus set the readers’ minds into movement and make them interact with the contents of the poem. They become part of the action. The sudden translation of French landscapes into Hell also calls attention to the heroism of the soldiers who, despite fear and danger, still run and rush into hell “out-fiending all its fiends and flames” (l.41). The heroism is further underlined by the adjective “superhuman” line 43, though the adjective qualifies the noun “inhumanities”, which in turn highlights the idea that even if the men can be heroic in their actions, the reason that calls for such heroism is not heroic at all – it is not even human. 

After line 40, once the assault is over, Owen’s choice of words relies more heavily on longer words referring to abstract concepts such as “inhumanity”, “long-famous glories” or “immemorial shames”. There and in the final three lines, which read: “And crawling slowly back, have by degrees / Regained cool peaceful air in wonder – / Why speak they not of comrades that went under?”, Owen’s voice of protest, which is not raised against the soldiers, who remain comrades, but against the war itself, and part of the civilian response to the war is heard again. Raising his voice against the war while showing the soldiers’ heroism in turn creates balance and unity. This sense of unity is in fact secured by the use of repetitions and echoes – “last” is used lines 1 and 34, “the end of the world”, line 7, echoes “this world’s verge” line 37 and the “cool peaceful air” of line 46 seems to be a variation on the “May breeze” of line 9. The poem ends as it had started: in silence, stillness and sensory quietness, an almost pastoral picture, tainted with the memory and feeling of the war that was conveyed by the sensuous description of the offensive. The ending is poised between accusation and sympathy, between the beauty of nature outside of war and the horrors of battle, between France, England and No Man’s Land, between Owen’s voice of protest and his understanding of the inability to speak about the war, which both resonate in the final question. 

“Spring Offensive” is a poem of harmony and unity that maintains a balance between sensations and abstractions, between Owen’s Romantic heritage and his French experience at the war and between Owen’s celebration of the soldiers and his protests against the war. The poem constantly crosses borders. The borders between the two countries that shaped Owen’s poethood, Great Britain and France, are crossed through various references to traditional English poetry and to the experience of the war in France. The borders between the readers, the French Western Front and the text are partially erased by Owen in his choice of emphasizing the sensuousness of the French landscape and of humanizing it with the soldiers. Following, the focus on sensuousness calls attention to the sensory experience of the soldiers and of the war itself, but also to the feelings and concepts associated with the experience. Doing so, Owen avoids the trap of either glorifying the war itself or of dehumanising the soldiers. Ultimately, “Spring Offensive” significantly does not hide what the land and the body feel and perceive; it gives the French landscape and the soldiers who died there a way to speak of the comrades that went under without denying the terrible consequences the war had on both men and nature. Wilfred Owen found a voice in France; its landscape became a projection of the ambivalence of the war. France was not, however, the subject of his poetry. It was the raw material the poet distilled into poetry, displacing the locus of war from France itself to a more abstract place that makes the sensuousness of the landscape of “Spring Offensive” a site of questioning and conflict – beautiful and quiet, yet battered by the war, it mirrors the moments of peace the soldiers enjoyed as well as the violence of battle. Wilfred Owen does not once use the pronoun “I” in the poem but the way he fashions his poem and humanises the landscape still makes it possible to perceive the poet’s inner struggles and to see him find balance in accepting that some questions and issues can never be answered, must remain the unvoiced mystery suggested in the closing question: “Why speak not they of comrades that went under?”

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Fairer, David, and Christine Gerrard, editors. Eighteenth-Century Poetry: an Annotated Anthology. Wiley Blackwell, 2015.

Hibberd, Dominic. Owen the Poet. University of Georgia Press, 1986.

Hibberd, Dominic. Wilfred Owen: a New Biography. e-book, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2019.

Hipp, Daniel W. “’By Degrees / Regained Peaceful Air in Wonder’: Wilfred Owen, Shell Shock, and Poetic Identity”. The Poetry of Shell Shock: Wartime Trauma and Healing in Wilfred Owen, Ivor Gurney and Siegfried Sassoon, by Daniel W. Hipp, McFarland & Co., 2005, pp. 44–107.

Keats, John. Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger, Cambridge : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982. 

Keats, John. John Keats: Selected Letters, ed. Robert Gittings, revised by Jon Mee, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Owen, Wilfred. The Poems of Wilfred Owen, ed. Jon Stallworthy, Chatto & Windus, 2014.

Owen, Wilfred et al. Collected Letters. Oxford University Press, 1967.

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Shen, Yeshayahu. “Cognition and the Use of Figurative Language in Poetry: the Case of Poetic  Synaesthesia”. The Systemic and Empirical Approach to Literature and Culture as Theory and Application, by Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and Irene Sywenky, Research Institute for Comparative Literature and Cross-Cultural Studies, University of Alberta, Edmonton, 1997, pp. 169–179. 

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^[1] Dominic Hibberd also notes echoes to Keats’s odes and to Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam in the poem, making the landscape a recollection of childhood memories and a recreation of the Romantic landscapes the two Romantic poets had taught him to admire. See Hibberd, Dominic. Owen the Poet. University of Georgia Press, 1986, p. 188.

^[2] See also Hibberd, Dominic. Owen the Poet. University of Georgia Press, 1986, p. 186 

^[3] Keats, John. John Keats: Selected Letters, éd. Robert Gittings, revised by Jon Mee, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Letter to George and Tom Keats, 21 December 1817. 

Laure-Hélène Anthony-Gerroldt is currently teaching translation and the poetry of Wilfred Owen at the Université de Bourgogne. She has recently defended her doctoral thesis, entitled Le devenir poétique de la sensation keatsienne dans l’oeuvre de Wilfred Owen, and completed her PhD in English poetry at the Université de Bourgogne. Her doctoral research focused on the use of sensations and synaesthesia in the works of John Keats and on their influence on Wilfred Owen’s war poetry. She is currently working on Caroline Bertonèche and Marc Porée’s creative, virtual project around the celebration of the bicentenary of John Keats’s death.