Youth is wasted on the young. Except when it’s wasted for them—by, for example, war.
This is the first of a few posts stemming from Wilfred Owen’s Preface to His Projected Book of Poems (1918) and occasioned by a recent conference--Generation M: Resetting Modernist Time--at the University of Amsterdam. In Owen's Preface, the word "generation" is hardly a headliner. It should be. The trouble is that although generational rubrics, standards, and alignments are ubiquitous in literary study, we don’t tend to think of the word “generation” itself as a site for inquiry, as a problem. The “generation” seems given, innocuous, even appealingly democratic. But it is in fact a keyword in the Raymond Williams sense: a word about which we must develop “just that extra edge of consciousness” (24) as it does its work across disciplines and documents—including indelible statements of twentieth-century poetics.
In the case of Owen’s terse Preface, “indelible” might be a nicer way of saying “over-familiar.” The Preface is typically remembered for the words War, Poetry, and pity. Owen made sure of that. He asserts the importance of those words first by comparison. He tells us what his book of poems will not be about:
This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.
Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War.
Owen may not be a modernist, but his Preface opens with one of the signature rhetorical gestures of modernism: the evacuation of meaning from grandiose, excessive, obfuscatory language. Here, however, the deflation of “glory” and “honor” was to precede poems that don’t exert modernist discipline. In Peter Howarth’s great phrase, Owen “load[s] every rift with gore” (188).
From comparison to capitalization: Owen inscribes the importance of War and Poetry by lifting portentous capitals from Honor and Glory giving them instead to War and Poetry: “Above all I am not concerned with Poetry”—occupatio—and “My subject is war, and the pity of War. The poetry is in the pity.” Driven as his Preface is by “nor,” “not,” and “no,” Owen here assigns markedly positive, unqualified value to pity, war, and poetry. It matters that for Owen “war” and “the pity of war” form a single “subject,” rather than two subjects. The event and the affect are not to be disentangled. War, poetry, pity. Done.
And yet. The Preface continues: “Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next.” Those sentences do at least three things: 1. They bespeak the poet’s confidence that his poems will be read in their own time and then continue to be read; 2. They accept the mutability of literary meanings and effects across time; 3. They adopt the unit of the generation to describe both the audience and the constituency of the lyric I that Owen’s poems forge.
Owen’s generational thinking recasts the lyric I, locating the import of his voice in its historical, experiential representativeness rather than in, say, its timeless singularity. Further, as the Preface moves from “English poetry” to “this generation,” it posits “this generation” as a new, alternate site for affiliation. Owen’s generational lyric I coalesces at least amid, and perhaps even against, a national one. His speaker is often more concerned to identify as young than he is to identify as English. In the next couple of (projected) posts, I’ll explore how Owen’s war poems bear out these claims, and what they illuminate about war and poetry in our own time.
*
Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Howarth, Peter. British Poetry in the Age of Modernism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
I wonder when the word "generation" began to be used this way - as a historical marker, let's say. I'm reminded of JFK's inaugural address, where war is the experience of his generation as well:
"Generation" as keyword is such a brilliant move, Claire. Can't wait for the next installments. It strikes me that mass war has a special capacity to give coherence to "generation," because suddenly simple age determines who can be conscripted (or volunteer) to participate in the generational experience. World war instantly gives new meaning to at least three generations: the generation who fight, the generation who are too old to fight (the predatory older men who are guilty for the deaths of Owen's "youth" or "children") and then, as you point out from Owen's preface, the "next" generation who have avoided the historical trauma. When and where does the idea of a succession of literary generations matter? One of the striking things about Owen's situation as an early-twentieth-century poet is that he does not seem to us to affiliate with the "modernist" generation--and to be, in some sense, prior to them. Yet that generation was mostly born in the 1880s (Woolf, 1882; Eliot, 1888; Pound, 1885; Loy, 1882; not to speak of Yeats, b. 1865, etc.) and so Owen is actually younger than the generation which nonetheless, by dint of developing its institutions in the 1920s, seems to have made a successful claim to "succeed" the generation of the "War Poets." In other words, a generation can be a tendentious fiction imposed from outside that rewrites chronology. Does Owen's work talk back to this?
This is so great, Claire. You really bring to life the emergence of the "generation" as a critical idiom of WWI-era self-knowledge. I can't wait to hear more. Would you agree, in answer to William's question, that the philosopher who most likely shapes or at least codifies the concept of the 'generation' in European intellectual history is Ortega y Gasset [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gasset/]? For him, the 'generation' (as a term through which a social world is experienced by 'coevals' or 'contemporaries') even formed the basis for a philosophy of history. And the logics of the "generación" as he defines it become indistinguishable from the narration of peninsular literary history in those first decades of the 20th c---from the Generación del 98 to the Generación del 36. I'd be keen to know where you think he fits in the generation story, or if there are others Owen coevals who are theorizing generationality so explicitly.
Thanks for this brilliant post, Claire—I'm looking forward to reading more from this project. I've been thinking lately of novels that track cohorts of people of approximately the same age—Woolf's The Waves, for instance, or Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. These generational relations are in some ways similar to sibship, but deracinated from narratives of reproduction and direct descent ("my parents" becomes "our parents' generation"). It seems to me that the "generation" does something to contain the self-difference produced by aging: one is radically other to one's child-self, but within your "generation" you can remember one another's child selves and offer one another back some continuity and memory. "I remember your childhood because my child-self was there" at once relates the addressee to her childhood and identifies the speaker with her own child-self on the site of a shared past.