Wilfred Owen’s Poetry: A Response to Trauma

Abstract

Literary genres right from their origin and development flare up in reaction to either the human amalgamation of assimilation or disassociation. The writers’ inner voice always tries to find a window to express or respond to the system that they want to expose or trim in different genres that suit their inner urge to do so. While the drama enacts indomitable human spirit as wells as its frivolities through its dramatic personae, other genres like novel, life narratives and the short story narrate or reflect the same either in reminiscent or omniscient mood. But, poetry as expressed by William Wordsworth, “Poetry is a spontaneous over flow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility”; for Mathew Arnold, poetry means, “a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty”. He means that poetry would follow the principles of poetic truth and poetic beauty; for T. S. Eliot, “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion, it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality”; for Wilfred Owen, poetry is a reaction to the horrors of war particularly First World War. His unique style is that his usage of half rhyme and assonance rather than usage of full rhyme. He also rejected the traditional poetic forms of his predecessors. He penetrates into the mental trauma of the soldiers whose heinous experience of trench life has been delineated shockingly in all his poems. The paper tries to explore Owen’s poetic creative sensibility as well as his response to the conflicts of human mind and trauma that had been felt by the warriors with reference to his representative poems.