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Transcript

Wilfred Owen. "Dulce et Decorum Est." 1917.

Jessie Pope. "The Call." 1914.

Siegfried Sassoon, 1920

"this [Owen's 'Preface'], and his Poems, can speak for him, backed by the authority of his experience as an infantry soldier, and sustained by nobility and originality of style."

Early editors

D.S.R. Welland, 1960

Edmund Blunden, 1931

"Another version--it was a poem over which the author took much trouble--is addressed 'To a Certain Poetess'--i.e. to the type of those who provided the public from day to day with cheerful patriotic jingles."

"...main difference between the two poems is that where the [Dulce] is the immediate product of the white-hot indignation to which he had been brought (as one manuscript reveals) by the patriotic lines of Miss Jessie Pope that frequently graced the popular newspapers, ‘The Sentry’ is a report on experience in a much richer sense, muted yet imaginatively evocative where the other is strident and exhausting.

Cecil Day Lewis, 1963

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,

And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .

Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Who’s for the trench—

Are you, my laddie?

Who’ll follow the French—

Will you, my laddie?

Who’s fretting to begin?

Who’s going out to win?

And—who wants to save his skin—

Do you, my laddie?

Who’s for the khaki suit—

Are you, my laddie?

Who longs to charge, and shoot—

Do you, my laddie?

Who’s keen on getting fit?

Who means to show his grit?

And—who’d rather wait a bit—

Would you, my laddie?

Who’ll earn the Empire’s thanks—

Will you, my laddie?

Who’ll swell the victor’s ranks—

Will you, my laddie?

When that procession comes,

Banners and rolling drums—

Who’ll stand and bite his thumbs—

Will you, my laddie?

W.B. Bebbington. "Jessie Pope and Wilfred Owen." 1972.

Sources Pope's wartime writing

Jessie Pope and Wilfred Owen:

An Origin Story

  • enforces a gender binary
  • ignores source context

Gives the text of "The Call"

Jon Stallworthy, 1974

"Nowhere else in any of the poet’s manuscripts and letters is the lady named or referred to, and there is no evidence that she ever knew anything about him. As for the ‘dedication’ itself, editors and anthologists have either not quoted it or have relegated it to a note.”

  • manipulates Pope's words

in a way that silences her

  • infers her politics from Owen's poetry

Mentions Pope's children's literature

“Such was the sentimental and provocative theme of almost sixty poems … England stood in peril, and it was unthinkable that the ‘lads’ of her own day were less patriotic and brave than the men who had ‘fought and bled’ to make that England ‘Merrie.’”

“We can assume that Jessie Pope was the ‘friend’ of the poem who had been telling with ‘high’—though perhaps not with ‘noble’—‘zest’ to ‘children’—or ‘small boys’—‘ardent for some desperate glory,’ what she apparently accepted as an old truth but Owen believed to be an old lie.”

Six Foundational Texts of Wilfred Owen Scholarship

  • subtly links her with Owen's enlistment
  • assumes that children are her only intended

audience, regardless of context

“There were, nevertheless, parts of some poems [of Pope’s] which—if [Owen] saw them—must have nagged at his civilian separation from the awful thing that was invariably tempting him in its direction.”

"For the ‘laddies’ and ‘lads’ of 1914, 1915, and 1916 were the ‘small boys’ who, with small girls, had been her audience for the verse which she wrote as captions to the pictures in many pre-war children’s books. Very young children were, indeed, her other main public throughout her life, and she provided the texts, usually in verse, for a large number of illustrated books whose characters were, of course, animals and birds: Bunnies, Bobbity Flop, Cat Scouts, Flip and Fuzzy, Toddles, the Tracy Tubbses and many more. One cannot help but wondering if Owen ever saw any of these when he was a small boy."

Constructing Owen

1. War poetry is defined in terms of Experience, Truth, and Facts.

2. Owen is discussed in terms of victimhood and helplessness.

3. Owen is connected to Keats.

4. Owen represents a promising life cut short.

5. Owen is described in biblical terms.

Arthur Lane, 1972

“To have imported alien abstractions to categorize the war would have been to betray the facts and the men who died in making the facts."

"But in the trenches, a new kind of heroism was most obviously manifest; the hero of the First World War was each man who took upon himself the act of sacrifice and walked, on command, out into No Man’s Land."

“Owen and Sassoon remained true to their experience and to the facts: they wrote what was, not what might have been.”

"… both Owen and Sassoon demonstrate the anguish ... of deploying men they respected and loved in accordance with impersonal orders which were frequently mass death-warrants. Neither took lightly his responsibilities as an officer. Both were appalled by their enforced complicity in Haig’s grand schemes of slaughter, and the bitter awareness of their dilemma recurs constantly."

“If the subject [of her poems] were not so serious, one could afford to laugh off Miss Pope as the faintly ridiculous lady she was."

Punch. 21 October 1914.

Crucial Contexts for Pope

Punch. 4 November 1914.

The Daily Mail. 26 November 1914.

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