Affiliation:
1. English, University of Maine
Abstract
AbstractIn his draft preface for the book he did not live to publish, Wilfred Owen articulated a stance toward the writing of war poetry that has since served as one of the standards against which other war poets are judged. Emphatically rejecting “glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power” as fitting subjects, he located the “Poetry” of war in the “pity” it arouses for soldiers, describing his own work as a mixture of elegy and warning. He had little use for poets who, for reasons of ideology, embraced the values that he rejected. His best-known poem, “Dulce Et Decorum Est,” is a denunciation of such embrace, dedicated in a draft “To a certain poetess,” identified in another draft as Jessie Pope, well-known for her exhortations to enlistment. Dickinson’s war poetry articulates a very different stance than Owen’s, and yet she was not a poetess in the manner of Pope. Her treatment of war is not easily reconcilable to an ideological position. A survey of her work yields a wide range of attitudes, with Owen’s horror of war and Pope’s ardor for it equally encompassed. For Dickinson, war is at once a condition of violence with which one must reckon and, in that reckoning, a test of personal qualities. Her abiding interest in those qualities stands in marked contrast to Owen’s skepticism. At the same time, her treatment of them, irreducible to a single outlook, puts her at odds with ideological poets such as Pope.