A Critical Analysis of Wilfred Owen's "Disabled"

Wilfred Owen, a Soldier Poet who spent time in several military hospitals after being diagnosed with neurasthenia, wrote the poem "Disabled" while at Craiglockhart Hospital, after meeting Seigfried "Mad Jack" Sassoon. A look at Owen's work shows that all of his famed war poems came after the meeting with Sassoon in August 1917 (Childs 49). In a statement on the effect the Sassoon meeting had on Owen's poetry, Professor Peter Childs explains it was after the late-summer meeting that Owen began to use themes dealing with "breaking bodies and minds, in poems that see soldiers as wretches, ghosts, and sleepers" (49). "Disabled," which Childs lists because of its theme of "physical loss," is interpreted by most critics as a poem that invites the reader to pity the above-knee, double-amputee veteran for the loss of his legs, which Owen depicts as the loss of his life. An analysis of this sort relies heavily on a stereotypical reading of disability, in which "people with disabilities are more dependent, childlike, passive, sensitive, and miserable" than their nondisabled counterparts, and "are depicted as pained by their fate" (Linton, 1998, p. 25). Such a reading disregards not only the subject's social impairment, which is directly addressed by Owen, but it also fails to consider the constructed identity of the subject, as defined by the language of the poem. A large reason for the imposition of pity comes from the pen of Owen, himself, who wrote that the chief concern in his poetry is "War, and the pity of War. The poetry is in the pity" (Kendall, 2003, p. 30). Owen's pity approach to poetry succeeded in protesting the war because it capitalized on human losses. Adrian Caesar makes it very clear that the experience of war was Owen's reason for joining. Even after being hospitalized for neurasthenia, Owen chose to return to France because he knew his poetry had improved due to his experience in the trenches (Caesar, 1987, p. 79). Whatever the case, Owen had