I am due to go back to the Somme this autumn with a group of
writers, the tip being organised by Vanessa Gebbie and led by our guide
Jeremy Banning. So I am spending the summer engaging with Wilfred Owen’s poetry. A
poet whose work I have not studied since I was at school as a teenager although
it feels as if his poems have been in the background for most of my life. The
credit for coming up with the idea of a summer reading project goes to a
writer, ‘good reads friend’ and librarian in Boston who suggested we could read
his poems together. She is reading a good many other books as well. We are
taking it ten poems at a time and the original plan was to have read most of
his poems by the middle of August.
Alongside the poems I’ve also been discovering what Owen was
like as a person thanks to Dominic Hibberd’s – Wilfred Owen A new biography.
It
was Hibberd’s edition of the poems that I read at school all those years ago so
it seems entirely appropriate that he should once again be my guide. Somehow I
had missed the obituary notices last autumn and was considerably saddened to
learn that Dominic Hibberd had died. But what a gift he left behind him. It
feels as if he must have known Wilfred personally and in a way I suppose he
did. Here is what he has to say about Wilfred at Ripon in that final spring of
1918.
“Wordsworth had said that the poet is the rock of defence
for human nature, and he had claimed that all good poetry arises from ‘the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’, allied to long and deep thought.
The emotion is ‘recollected in tranquillity’ until it recreates itself in the
mind and a poem begins to grow. Wilfred knew that the recollecting and thinking
had to be done, but it was going to be a dangerous business. In all the history
of English poetry, there can have been few braver, more extraordinary
undertakings than his at Ripon. His double duty was now clear: as an officer,
he had to return to the front; as a poet, he had to write about it. By day he
trained for the fighting that would probably kill him, and in the warm spring
evenings he walked down a quiet country lane to his secret retreat, a
windowless room where he could open his ‘inward eye’ to the experiences that
had almost driven him mad a year earlier. There was pleasure in it, as
Wordsworth had promised, the pleasure of being driven by the poetic impulse and
using a fast-developing talent to the full, but there was also terror. Alone
and with no support, Wilfred summoned up the phantoms of the mind, and as they
gathered in the shadowy corners of the room, he forced them to show themselves
and obey his will.”
(Hibberd p309)
