Daniel Hipp explores wartime trauma and its role in inspiring a trio of gifted WWI soldier-poets - Wilfred Owen, Ivor Gurney and Siegfried Sassoon - to heal through words by finding structure in the aftermath of "psychological wreckage."
"All men were children once who smelled of peace."
Yehuda Amichai
Daniel Hipp, assistant professor of English at Aurora University in Illinois, has produced a thorough and engaging study of poetry’s role in healing the mental trauma wrought by warfare. Culling 152 sources, he focuses on World War I British soldier-poets Wilfred Owen, Ivor Gurney and Siegfried Sassoon, three of the most studied poets of the war. In particular, Hipp sought “to provide a broad understanding of the role that shell shock played...artistically, in providing the impetus for [their] poetry.” The literary and exegetical precedent for the healing work of these three poets is found in the rebirth and redemption passages of T.S. Eliot’s "The Waste Land." Eliot, who suffered from his own mental trauma, believed that “structures of stability” and "meaning out of disorder” could be achieved through creative writing, especially poetry.
By 1917, thousands of soldiers were unambiguously experiencing shell shock
from combat on the battlefields of Europe. ‘Shell shock’ is an umbrella term, not simply a reference to mental or psychic damage caused by exploding artillery shells. Specifically, it is “a series of complex conditions brought about by the individual soldier’s heightened state of anxiety during warfare and by his participation, observation, and complicity within the horrors of the trenches and the battlefield.” Through a highly informative 28-page chapter, Hipp introduces his readers to the clinical background of shell shock, providing the history of its diagnosis during and after the war. Originally thought to be brain or nerve damage - or even simple cowardice - its psychological basis underwent a vast therapeutic and clinical evolution as a result of the war, incorporating advances of emergent analyses including Freud’s psychotherapy. The range of therapies ran from electric shock to gardening. But as Hipp informs us, the voices emerging from the poets show the inner workings of their minds which academic and medical studies - and the attendant therapies - could only approach from a distance. Indeed, psychological therapies, especially those of Freud and psychologist W.H.R. Rivers (1864-1922) of Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh - where Sassoon and Owen were treated - proved “most relevant when considering the role that the artistic representation of war could play as therapy for those traumatized by the experience."
Lieutenant Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) entered Craiglockhart in June, 1917, to be treated for the symptoms of stammering, disorientation, and nightmares brought on by months of combat that culminated in a particularly horrific bombardment. Under the treatment of Arthur Brock’s ergotherapy Owen was given impetus to further represent the war in poetic form. In his early war poems, Owen brought the chaos of war down to a tightly manageable form, one subject to his creative control. At the heart of his poetic impulse was an unconscious realization that the task of leading his men on the battlefield led to their destruction. His poetry thus confronted the terrible way war isolated and incapacitated individual combatants. While at Craiglockhart Owen met Sassoon from whom he learned to hone the irony and vernacular of his later poems which would reflect psychological and metric complexity (Owen mainly wrote sonnets). The progression evident in Owen’s work attenuated the nightmares of his wartime experience. Unfortunately, he was killed in action one week before the Armistice was declared.
Ivor Gurney (1890-1937) spent his war years writing both music and poetry. A brilliant student before his enlistment with the potential of becoming a composer, Gurney was hospitalized in 1922 with a condition the medical establishment named “Deferred Shell Shock.” Wounded in April 1917 and gassed in September of that year, he became increasingly aware of his deteriorating mental state - likely a bipolar disorder that arose prior to his military service. The character and purpose of Gurney’s poetry was somewhat different from Owen’s and Sassoon’s in that his did not contain overtly anti-war protest elements. While questioning the nobility of dying for one’s country, Gurney had a more personally urgent concern in his verse: to distance his mind from the source of emotional pain as he fought the resurfacing of mental illness. As such, through the psychological wreckage of war’s aftermath he sought to “draw strength from visions of beauty that exist in [the] natural world.” His poetic imagination turned the obliterated landscapes of France into an “emotional anchor” where “art can, if not heal altogether, at least offer relief.” Regrettably, full relief never came for Gurney whose mental and physical deterioration led to his untimely death in 1937.
Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) was also a patient at Craiglockhart, and was
treated by W.H.R. Rivers. Like Owen, his hospitalization was due, in part, to “his anxiety about his role and responsibility for the sufferings of those he commanded.” His diary entries underscored the mental strain he was under. However, Sassoon’s entry into Craiglockhart was primarily due to political reasons: he had protested vehemently against what he considered was Parliament’s complicity in needlessly prolonging the war. In Sassoon’s case, hospitalization was the attempt by British authorities to hide away - if momentarily - one of its decorated officers. Through an eloquent use of irony and satire, he believed his poetry could educate his readership “to a reality from which they were shielded. But by his second volume of war poetry, Counter-Attack, Sassoon began to represent the war through “the potentially curative technique of confession and autobiography;” he needed to redress the way war increases the separation between he as an officer, and his subordinates, the ones who suffered the cruelty he witnessed and wrote so much about. Hence, his need to return to the front to be with his soldiers took precedence over his earlier protests which looked to an immediate end to a war he had no control over. This thematic shift was due in large measure to Rivers’ treatment of Sassoon, the goal of which was to “elicit his feelings toward the noble dimensions of the war” and toward his men in particular. This feeling had been exacerbated by his belief that he did not belong at Craiglockhart, a place he believed was only for serious cases. Though anger and resentment were part of his natural response to wartime loss, in the end, he perceived reconciliation with the men he believed he had abandoned through his time away from the front.
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