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Anthem for Dead Doomed Youth

I went down to London today and had a couple of hours to kill so I paid a visit to the British Library to see their Newspaper Front Page exhibition. I also had a quick scoot around the "Treasures of the British Library" exhibition which I've blogged about here before.
There was something there that caught my eye relating to a film I watched recently called Regeneration. In the film, and indeed in the book on which it is based there is a rather clumsy scene between poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.
Actually, I'll back up a bit in case you don't know who they are. Sassoon and Owen are two of the best known of the "War Poets". Sassoon was perhaps the foremost poet during the war, though it is his protégé Wilfred Owen who wrote some of the more enduring and resonant work. In the current era where war has been reduced to a TV show and the First World War is often reduced to "Yeah, we thrashed them Krauts" rather than the devastating slaughter of an entire generation that it was, Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est remains as bitter a truth now as it was when first written.
Owen was to meet Sassoon in Craiglockhart Hospital, Edinburgh.The hospital catered for victims of shell shock. Owen ended up there as a result of his experiences in The Somme. He once described Serre, the hamlet I visited earlier this year on the trail of the Sheffield City Battalion, as "Seventh Hell" and that is where the seeds of his condition were planted.
Sassoon on the other hand was at Craiglockhart because of his anti-war "Declaration" which had been delivered to Parliament, in which he had accused the powers that be of deliberately prolonging the war to serve ends that went far beyond the original intention. Brushing the Declaration aside as the product of a man scared by war was the easiest escape route for the government, the army, and it has to be said for Sasson himself.
Sassoon was, it seems to me, a fairly arrogant and cynical individual, and was very much a product of his class and his time. To Owen though, he was a God. Owen worshipped him. He was utterly infatuated with him. He devoured Sassoon's poetry and yet hesitated to emulate it. Poetry served a different purpose to Owen. It was an expression of the beautiful in the world and so how could one therefore write about the war, which was unremittingly ugly.
This was at odds with Sassoon's view that poetry should give voice to your thoughts and experiences, and so how could one therefore not write about the war? To avoid the subject would be a dereliction of the duty of a poet. This was a point of view that Sassoon successfully impressed on the impressionable Wilfred Owen.
Which brings me back to that clunky scene in Regeneration. It is fairly standard for films that deal with artists to at some stage attempt to depict the artistic process. In Oliver Stone's The Doors for example, you have the rather absurd scene where Ray Manzerek is writing the opening riff to Light My Fire. He gets the first few notes and after a bit of trial and error gets the fourth, and after some further Les Dawson style playing finds the fifth and so on. Because, yeah, that's how you write a pop song, just play random notes until you find one you like.
This is largely how the scene in Regeneration plays out. The awe struck and love struck Owen brings Sassoon a draft of his poem "Anthem for Doomed Youth" and together they work on it, trying out different words and phrases until they find one they like.
It would be easy to dismiss the scene but for the fact that in a dark corner of the British Library is the actual manuscript depicted in the film. Owen's verse is laid out in quiet and understated handwriting drawn with a soft pencil. Over the top in dark, bold ink is sprawled Sassoon's corrections, obliterating certain words and replacing them with his own. It is a fitting representation of the art of poetry, the poetry of war, and above all of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon's relationship.

Friday, June 02, 2006 2:47 AM