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IN A LETTER dated 12 September 1917, Wilfred Owen wrote home to his mother, Susan, describing the nature of his relationship with Siegfried Sassoon:
Sassoon I like equally in all the ways you mention, as a man, as a friend, as a poet.... The Friend is intensely sympathetic* (*sym-pathy=feeling with (Greek)), with me about every vital question on the planet or of it.... We have followed parallel trenches all our lives, and have more friends in common, authors I mean, than most people can boast of in a life time.1
Owen's Greek annotation of "sympathetic," or empathetic feeling with, provides an important frame to their friendship. The critical cue for this article comes from the recent scholarship of George Haggerty who has emphasized the Greek context of friendship as a corrective to the complex nature of same-sex friendships. By reading Owen and Sassoon's creative bond in this way, we can see how this Greek context shapes the writing and editing of one of the most anthologized Great War poems, Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth."
For Haggerty-and Owen and Sassoon-the fruits of friendship go much further than merely the erotic. In "Pan Pipes: Conjugal Friendship in The Longest Journey," Haggerty examined Forster's novel vis-àvis the Platonic ideal of friendship to exemplify the potential of malemale bonds, or what he refers to as "conjugal friendship."2 Outside of reproductive futurity, Haggerty demonstrates that friendship has the power to stake out the significance of recognizing physical and intellectual intimacy beyond what is simply sexual. Conjugal friendship, in other words, is about what can be created rather than negated within the context of same-sex intimacy. By referencing the Symposium in its original language, Haggerty focuses on a cultural understanding of friendship based in classical terms. While his approach differs from Jose Muñoz's framework of a Marxist-Blochian utopia, Haggerty's conjugal friendship endorses a similar sense of relational politics that brings the past into the present for a better future. When the understanding of conjugal friendship is mapped onto Owen's relationship with Sassoon, it becomes apparent that Owen's verse performs the very relational politics that are at the heart of Muñoz's work in Cruising Utopia.
Muñoz is skeptical of normative assumptions about time, particularly the future. He takes a Marxist approach inflected...