Dominic Hibberd, from"Sassoon," inOwen the Poet (Macmillan Press, 1986).

Dominic Hibberd discusses the changes which began to characterize Owen's poetry as a result of his experience of war. With the support of Sigfried Sasson, Owen began to move away from the romanticism of his earlier poetry, altering the language of his verse to reflect his newly gained understanding of the reality of war, and distinguishing his verse more clearly from that of the continuing apologists for war as noble sacrifice. In the following passage, he describes the changes Owen made in successive drafts of his poem "Anthem."

Sassoon would have seen the first draft's shortcomings at once. Even if Owen did not mean it to be a statement in support of the British war effort, it could be used in that way. It was uncomfortably close to popular war poems such as Laurence Binyon's 'For the Fallen' or Beatrix Brice's 'To the Vanguard'.•1• So Sassoon cancelled 'solemn' in favour of 'monstrous' and changed 'our guns' and 'majestic insults' to 'the guns' and 'blind insolence.' Owen followed these pointers in subsequent drafts, removing the anti-German and sanctifying elements from the octave by making shells 'demented', introducing the 'patter' of rifles (the word derives from the meaningless repetition of paternosters) and describing doomed youth as 'cattle' for whom any rites would be 'mockeries'. These changes do not fully conceal the tone of the first draft, but they might have been enough if the sestet had been different. If Sassoon sensed that the last six lines were unsatisfactory, he would not have known Owen well enough to see what was wrong. The difficult transition from battlefields to home is admirably managed by means of bugles, which were familiar in both places (memorial services in 'sad shires' often ended with a bugle call). But the strongest objection to 'Anthem' is that its sestet betrays Owen's hard-won maturity by slipping back into the nostalgia that he had expressed in 'A New Heaven' before he had seen the trenches. The sestets of both sonnets propose that dead soldiers can find immortality in the memory and affection of their families.

1. Binyon, 'At the going down of the sun ... We will remember them' (1914). Brice, 'the voice of monstrous guns' (1916). WO liked Binyon's poem in 1915 (CL, 355).