March 11, 1965 Herewith a few further sentences on the Britten-Owen . collaboration. Written by William Plomer, contemporary British poet and librettest of Britten's opera Gloriana, they exhale a slightly more orthodox Christian piety than the letters of the last two weeks, - - -_ and do it with extraordinary sensitivity. I have just come across them, and thought you might enjoy them. R
It is a function of creative men to perceive the relations between thoughts, or things, or forms of expression that may seem utterly different, and to be able to combine them into some new form. Britten's Nocturne, for example, which unifies musically a group of poems by different hands, is a notable example of his power to connect the seemingly unconnected. It was a totally unexpected and weightier feat of imagination to see the possibility of combining together the traditional form of the Latin Mass for the Dead -- so formidable in its solemn grandeur, so grave in i~s religious and musical associations -- with the utterance of a young English poet killed many years ago in battle. The popular poet of the First World War was Rupert Brooke, who seemed to many to embody an ideal image of radiant British youth sacrificing itself for its countr y. His work was in tune with the conventional patriotic sentiments of the time. But the poetry of Wilfred Owen, who was killed in France just before the Armistice in 1918) after winning the Ivi ilitary Cross, had to wait longer to be known. Owen was only 25, but his poems were profound, and are profoundly disturoing. They made no app o.al to the accepted opinions of his time about poetry or war. They were not about what soldiers gloriously did but what they had unforgivably been made to do to others and to suffer themselves. Owen did not accept what he called 11the old Lie" that it was necessarily glorious or even fitting to die for one's own or any other country, or that a country was necessarily or perhaps ever justified in making the kind of war he knew. As he saw and experienced it, war appeared as a hellish outrage on a huge scale against humanity, and a vi olation of Christianity. He shared the destiny of millions on both sides, but unlike them he had the sensibility to see what war now really meant, and the power to explain it. "My subject
is War," he wrote,
"and the pity
of War,
The Poetry is in the pity. :
Into his poetry went the pity, not of a detached outsider or a sentimentalist, nor simply that of a humane officer . for his men whose lives he cannot save and to whom he cannot hold out hope, but the pity of an imaginative man for fello w-suffere:i:¡ s unable to speak for themselves to later generations. And since right could hardly be on either side in a struggle which, by Christian and humane standards, seemed to him utterly wrong, pity led to the vision of some kind of reconciliation beyond the tortured and shapeless present. This is most explicit in the line from the poem "Strange Meeting 11, which comes almost at the end of the baritone solo in the last section of the War Requie~, the quietly and simply sung "I am the enemy you killed,
It is now clear War, and, b'3cause the has been the central yotmg lives tormented
my friend.
11
that Owen was the outstanding English poet of tbe First World Second World War was a continuation of it, of that too. War horror of European history in this century; and Owen, mourning and treated as expendable, was to speak as directly to mourners