UC Berkeley

This dissertation is a close look at poems written during the Great War by Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas, and Wilfred Owen. I describe how each deploys poetry’s formal resources to engage the affective, cognitive, spiritual, and political problems the war produces for them. I argue that strategies of poetic doubling allow them to address—if not quite assuage—the effects of the war that trouble them the most. Each poem manifests this doubling in different ways, but the tactic of doubling is pervasive. Ultimately, I argue that this doubling is equally an effect of the war’s incessant production of antagonistic cultural forms, and of lyric poetry’s fundamental ability to accommodate internal opposition at the formal level. The intrinsic ambivalence of poetic form makes it a particularly effective discourse for examining war’s social and political contradictions.

This unifying theme of formal doubling or what I call the “poetic versus”—double timeframes in Hardy, double identities and locations in Thomas, and two or more opposing verbal registers in Owen—is a careful instantiation of Isobel Armstrong’s influential figure of the “double poem.” I track examples of how poems formally enact the kind of doubleness Armstrong describes—how they enact a second-order commentary on their own primary expression. Doubling is a broad but apt name for the strategies by which the war’s disturbances and antagonisms are transferred between the poem’s double levels of engagement, whether conceived as formal/social (Raymond Williams), literary/political (Caroline Levine) or expressive/epistemological (Isobel Armstrong).

The prominent forms of doubling I identify line up with tenets of liberal political thought threatened by the war: Hardy’s trouble with time is tied to a belief in rational human progress that the war renders increasingly difficult to maintain. Thomas’s dual identities, in light of the economic forces that ultimately forced him to abandon writing for a soldier’s salary, are traceable to a crisis of alienation underlying liberalism’s basis in the individual. Owen’s project of incorporating voices of inherited cultural tradition and authority, only to expose them as the very origins of the war’s depredations is a critique of liberalism cast as a personal betrayal. Drawing on critical work by William Empson and Paul Fussell, I identify a complex form of irony as the crucial intellectual and affective stance which poetic doubling enables, a stance that becomes an increasingly important cultural survival strategy as the war persists.