Finding Wilfred Owen’s Forwarding Address: Moving Beyond the World War One Paradigm

Publication Type

Journal Article

Year of Publication

2005

Author

Hecker, William

Journal

Forum of Modern Language Studies

Volume

41

Number

2

Pages

136-148

Language

English

section

136

Keywords

force
Iliad
war

Annotation

Arguing war poetry has been defined by the work of the WWI poet, Wilfred Owen, as the ‘poetry of pity’; the author goes on to suggest new ways of evaluating the poetry of war. He takes as a new standard of evaluation Simone Weil’s idea drawn from her writing on the Iliad, that war represents a force that reduces people to the status of things. The article continues with an application of Weil’s view to some selected poems, arguing for its validity as a new paradigm for the interpretation of such poetry.