Is Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth” an Anti-Elegy? A Comparison with Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard”

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This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2024.2361213)

Notes

1 For example, Sandra M. Gilbert talks about the “historically consolatory genre of the elegy” (189).

2 Compare also Nils Clausson’s assessment: “[T]he traditional elegy and sonnet could no longer represent the truth of modern, mechanized war. They had to be either modernized or abandoned… . In ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth,’ Owen is not rejecting the sonnet and the elegy but modernizing them. And he modernizes the poetic tradition antiphonally; that is, he responds to it—and against it …” (169). This essay argues that he also responded with it.

3 Peter M. Sacks has also drawn attention to “the contemptuous lines referring to varieties of useless sound” (134).

4 Ramazani briefly notes the similarity to Gray’s “lowing herd” (71), but does not pursue the connection.

5 For the antiphonal character of the anthem, see Clausson, “Owen’s Antiphonal Response to Tradition.”

6 See Joshua Scodel’s The English Poetic Epitaph for further discussion of the “need for a sensitive reader” (320).