L’esperienza bellica in “The Send-off” di Wilfred Owen: una prospettiva filologica

Abstract

Due to his untimely death in battle, Wilfred Owen was never able to publish his poems; his surviving work consists only of interrupted compositional processes. As a philological study of “The Send-Off” reveals, the available documentation is often problematic: Owen’s writing procedure is characterized by a non-linear path, dotted with a stream of unresolved textual possibilities. Through an analysis of the main tendencies which characterize “The Send-Off”, this article proposes to explore some new aspects of the texts. In particular, it sheds new light on a web of connections among recurring ideas and themes in the poem, which offers a complex and multifaceted picture of both the war experience and its effects on the soldiers.