SOURCE: "Wilfred Owen," in Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney, The University of Chicago Press, 1994, pp. 69-96.

In the following excerpt, Ramazani examines Owen's challenge to received notions of elegiac conventions in his poetry.

Much as [Thomas] Hardy instilled his personal and public elegies with the intensified skepticisms of modernity, Wilfred Owen forged a new kind of elegy upon the anvil of modern industrialized warfare. One of Hardy's most capable admirers, Owen considered entitling a projected collection of his war poems English Elegies or, in a phrase from Shelley's elegy for Keats, With Lightning and with Music. But critics have not pursued the implication that Owen's poems should be read generically as elegies. This reluctance is understandable, since Owen's poems challenge received notions of elegiac convention, structure, and psychology. In poems such as "Anthem for Doomed Youth," "Futility," "Mental Cases," and "Miners," Owen exemplifies...