Thread by @PhilKlay

“[Wilfred] Owen was against the violence of war, against the massive sacrilegious waste of lives which it involved; he was a natural conscientious objector. And yet, when he actually drilled and led men to death, he was behaving in a way that contravened his personal conscience…

…in order to achieve what he saw as a greater goal, namely the awakening of a general conscience. ‘True poets must be truthful.’ ‘All a poet can do today is warn.’ These imperatives could be effectively fulfilled only if the poet who was warning or telling his truth was doing…

…so with the authority of experience, with the justification of soldiering behind him. Owen therefore suffered the strain of performing what most people perceived to be their unquestionable patriotic duty in order to gain the right to question whether it was duty at all…

…He connived in what he deplored so that he could deplore what he connived in: he earned the right to his lines by going up the line, and nobody who has read Owen’s poems and letters can underestimate their cost in terms of trauma and courage and heartbreak.”

—Seamus Heaney