Search results for "Wilfred Owen"
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« Making Sense of Wilfred Owen’s Keatsian Heritage: “Exposure” and “Ode to a Nightingale” »
2020
Readers of Wilfred Owen usually agree that the war poet’s early admiration for John Keats faded after he enlisted in the army; his poetry then turned against Keats’s. The opening paraphrase of Owen’s poem “Exposure” is thus often read as a rejection and a subversion of the Romantic poet’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” This essay will argue that Owen’s poem can be seen as a radical reversal of Keats’s ode. While “Exposure” is indeed more violent and political than “Ode to a Nightingale,” it does not depart from Keats’s conception of human suffering and of nature. Instead, the war poem builds on Keats’s fleeting description of suffering humanity in “Ode to a Nightingale” and extends it. It also ech…
"Over the last hill": Wilfred Owen's "Spring Offensive"
2021
Being the poet’s last completed piece, “Spring Offensive” makes France Wilfred Owen’s last poetic landscape. The article explores the ways in which “Spring Offensive” continuously crosses and blurs the borders between the French landscape and the poet’s English heritage; it also emphasizes the sensuousness of the landscape and of the war experience, so that the bodies of the soldiers and nature fuse and interact. “Spring Offensive” thus comes to reflect Owen’s search for balance, a search of which the French landscape becomes the natural yet symbolic representation.