Sensuous Devotion as the Site of Spiritual Crisis in Wilfred Owen
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Date
2015-03
Authors
Vance, Robyn
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
This thesis explores moments at which the spiritual crisis of World War I poet Wilfred Owen is connected to his use to sensuous language and imagery. Scholars have offered conflicting interpretations of Owen’s relationship to the Christian faith of his upbringing and his broader spiritual outlook. I argue that Owen’s war experience devastated his ability to perceive spiritual meaning, but that through the use of sensuous language to elegize the bodies of soldiers at the moment of their deaths, Owen creates a space in which the human body appears sacred even as spiritual faith is impossible. In Chapter 1, find the origins of this idea in Owen’s devotion to the sensuous Romantic poet John Keats in his early letters and poetry. In Chapter 2, I explore the implications of this spiritual crisis, and, in Chapter 3, I provide close readings of the war poems “Insensibility,” “Futility,” and, “I Saw His Mouth’s Round Crimson.”
Description
56 pages. A thesis presented to the Department of English and the Clark Honors College of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for degree of Bachelor of Arts, Winter 2015.
Keywords
English, Wilfred Owen, John Keats, Poetry, World War I, Romanticism, Eroticism