New Influences: Georgians and Others

Abstract

After Owen was discharged from Craiglockhart on 30 October 1917, he devoted all his spare energies to poetry. Brock had taught him to work, Sassoon had given him purpose and confidence. On 3 December, for example, he finished one poem, drafted three more and determined to get up early next day to ‘do a dawn piece’. By the end of the month he was ready ‘to revise now, rather than keep piling up “first drafts”’, wishing he could give his ‘art’ the six hours a day it needed. In February he remembered the Broxton bluebells which had ‘fitted me for my job’. That job involved the risk of shellshock nightmares: ‘I confess I bring on what few war dreams I now have, entirely by willingly considering war of an evening. I do so because I have my duty to perform towards War.’¹ In order to define his task he read writers whom Sassoon admired, looking for guidance in both style and ideas from, among others, the Georgians, Barbusse and, almost certainly, Hardy and Russell. Now that there was good reason to bring his ‘art’ into the immediate service of the age, it was more than time to take account of contemporary writers.