Jon Silkin, fromOut of Battle: The Poetry of the Great War (The Macmillan Press, 1972).

Jon Silkin reads Owen's "poems of anger" with an eye to showing how the poet represents the emotions caused by war. Through detailed examination of several of the war poems, Silkin uncovers the paradoxical presence of both rage and compassion throughout the series. By revealing the pity of combat alongside the soldier's feeling that killing is unavoidable, Owen achieves an emotional complexity in his poems of anger which makes them his most authentic war poems.

Owen's difficulties are partly located in his perplexed self-questioning, 'And am I not myself a conscientious objector with a very seared conscience?' If he indicts the Church for its failure to accommodate this 'light', he also accuses himself. A combatant conscientious objector shares in the suffering but also in the killing. Owen did not and could not resolve the 'Victor-victim' paradox, but he tried. By fusing anger with compassion, he indicated that the only solution lay in people so rethinking their attitude to war that they would never wage it again. The sense of physical horror, anger, and pity must co-exist as mutually qualifying and interacting constituents. The presence of the anger and the physical horror prevents the sacred pity, which seems to be Owen's especial contribution, from neutralizing or shrouding war's enormities. But where the pity tends either to exclude the horror, or to operate in isolation, Owen risks our sense of the horror being dissolved in euphoria or religiosity, through his own incapacity (as I see it) or through others' (sometimes deliberate) misreading. By indulging the 'haloesque', readers are released from the horror and the guilt, or, at the least, their awareness of what has been done, and are thus enabled to accept fresh wars whenever it is expedient for their governments to start them.