The Poetry of Shell Shock: Wartime Trauma and Healing in Wilfred Owen, Ivor Gurney and Siegfried Sassoon

by Daniel W. Hipp

The British poets Wilfred Owen, Ivor Gurney, and Siegfried Sassoon found themselves psychologically altered by what they experienced in the First World War. Owen was hospitalized in April 1917 for "shell shock" in Scotland, where he met Siegfried Sassoon in June of that year, hospitalized for the same affliction. Ivor Gurney found the war, ironically, to have been a place of relative stability within an otherwise tormented life; When he was wounded during the war's final year, his doctors observed signs of mental illness, which evolved into incapacitating psychosis by 1922. For each of these men--all poets before the war--poetry served as a way to inscribe continuity into their lives, enabling them to retaliate against the war's propensity to render the lives of the participants discontinuous. Poetry allowed them to return to the war through memory and imagination, and poetry helped them to bring themselves back from psychological breakdown to a state of stability, based upon a relationship to the war that their literary war enabled them to create and discover. This work investigates the ways in which the poetry of war functioned as a means for these three men to express the inexpressible and to extract value out of the experience of war. Bibliography and index are also included. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may .

Genres: Poetry, War, World War I, History, Nonfiction

224 pages, Paperback

First published July 14, 2005

Reviews

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an intensely interesting examination of the poetry and psychological treatment of three Great War poets – Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Ivor Gurney. Sassoon and Owen were treated at Craiglockhart and returned to the front; Gurney broke down in March of 1918, and while he recovered enough to be discharged from the army by October, he continued to suffer from mental illness and spent the last fifteen years of his life in mental institutions, believing the war was still going on. But don’t despair! This isn’t a book of doom and gloom. Rather it’s an examination of the different ways poetic expression acted as therapy. By returning to the scenes of devastation in their memories and using their imaginations to transform those experiences into art, the poets took control of the uncontrollable. This book traces different aspects of that recovery.

Both the discussions (at times transcripts!) of the poets’ psychological treatments and the analysis of their poetry are accessible – and fascinating beyond description. This is an invaluable source for those interested in World War I poetry, psychotherapy, shell-shock, and the power of creative expression to deal with trauma. An absolute treasure!

[Barry Matthews · Rating 1 out of 5]

The reason I rated this book so poorly is because in the case of Wilfred Owen the whole premise upon which the author bases his findings is entirely incorrect. Wilfred Owen never suffered from shell-shock - that is a complete myth. There is no evidence offered by the author, he assumes everybody will believe it because he says it is so and because, to be fair to Dr Hipp, it has been said so often before. Repeating an historical accuracy will not make it the truth. Owen himself in a letter to his mother said "I am merely avoiding one" when discussing mental breakdown.
Army Form W3436 showed Owen had never suffered from shell-shock, was never 'wounded', was not permitted to wear a wound stripe and was only ever categorised as 'sick', one definition of which was 'hysteria'. He even travelled from Southampton to Craiglockhart Hospital by himself - that's how well he was. In May 1917 he was assessed as "NYD" - not yet diagnosed. Having walked into Craiglockhart, having taken the overnight sleeper to Edinburgh after going clothes shopping in London his assessment was that he was not suffering from shell-shock. Similarly Sassoon, a political incarceration was never diagnosed as suffering from shell-shock - he played golf most days!
Dr Barry Matthews

[Madeline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although this is a book about literary criticism, Hipp avoids the jargon of that genre and manages to use psychological terms and ideas - which are obviously especially relevant to this topic - with clarity. He has more sympathy for Owen and Gurney than he does for Sassoon, and although I don't think he addresses this bias it is fairly obvious. Of course, I like Owen more too, so I have a hard time faulting him for that. This is a very good look at the three poets, and I especially like the inclusion of Gurney.

[Rachel Louise Atkin]

Going to be coming back to this textbook through-out the year. I read chapters - Introduction, "Shell Shock in World War I", "Wilfred Own, Shell Shock, and Poetic Identity", and "War and Modern Poetry."
It's been incredibly informative in looking at the soldier's reasoning for their form, structure and theme choices in light of their shell-shock. I also liked the way it touched on modernism at the end.

[Mary van Ogtrop]

My senior thesis was called "Exposed on This Bleak Eminence: The Poetics of Shellshock." All about Siegfried Sassoon, society, language and blows to the head/ego/heart. At the time there were no books on the subject, so I had to go digging through the dregs of the Haverford College library system to find evidence to support my thesis. And now this book gets published? Are you kidding me?

[Eleni]

I can't rate this book because I only read the chapter on shell shock due to lack of time during my research weeks. I would have liked to have had time then to read the chapters on Gurney, Owen, and Sassoon as well.