John Allan Wyeth

His poetry having been neglected for 80 years, John Allan Wyeth is at long last receiving appropriate attention. BJ Omanson has established a new blog (here) in Wyeth's honour, and has posted an excellent essay of his own on Wyeth's work. The blog also lists many online resources, including an assessment by Dana Gioia of Wyeth's achievement, and three blogposts by yours truly.

Wyeth is a fantastic poet. If there is a better American soldier-poet of the First World War, I haven't encountered him yet.

Wyeth Redivivus

During his lifetime, John Allan Wyeth (1894-1981) won a minor reputation as a painter. As the obituary in the Trenton Times perfunctorily put it, he was a 'noted area artist'. The newspaper can be forgiven for making no mention of Wyeth's poetry: even his close family had no idea that he had published a book of poems, This Man's Army, in 1928. Wyeth is now starting to be recognised as the most important American soldier-poet of the Great War, thanks mainly to the good offices of BJ Omanson and Dana Gioia.

To read some of his poems, see the link above, and here. Gioia's essays are here and here. Here is a good blog post by David Laskin. For insights from yours truly, try these: French brothels, speech rhythms, German POWs. BJ Omanson explains here how he stumbled across Wyeth's work and brought it to prominence.

At last the Americans have found a soldier-poet of the Great War who is strong enough to be ranked alongside the best of the Brits. Whether the attention to Wyeth will peter out, or develop into sustained scholarship, remains to be seen.

Long-Lost American Poet of the Great War

'There is no better book of poems about the American experience in the Great War.' Dana Gioia's praise for John Allan Wyeth's This Man's Army, which was first published in 1928 and re-discovered eighty years later, seems entirely just. Admittedly, the bar has been set low, but Gioia also states that Wyeth's is 'probably the only volume that stands comparison with the work of the best British soldier poets'. That is high praise, and although such comparisons are problematic because Wyeth sounds nothing like those usual suspects, Gioia's claim does not seem manifestly absurd. His introduction, available here, also gives a fascinating account of the archaeological work by B. J. Omanson which brought this long-forgotten book to prominence. And here are Wyeth's Chipilly Ridge sonnets. I would quote from Wyeth myself, if only Blogger were more forgiving of poems whose lines are variously indented.

I have blogged already about Wyeth's brothel sonnet, that marvel of comedy, desire and disgust: Wyeth can pack more into 14 lines than many epics manage. Gioia speaks expertly about the radical rhythms of his sonnet forms, but even that description fails to convey the strangeness of Wyeth's best sonnets as they string snatches of vernacular dialogue across lines. Gioia associates Wyeth with Modernism, and it's not hard to see why. There is even a biographical prompt: based in Rapallo during 1926, Wyeth seems to have counted Ezra Pound as a friend.

But his knack of catching speech rhythms and bringing them into complex relation with formal and metrical traditions has more in common with Robert Frost. Frost writes to John Cournos in 1914 that ‘there are the very regular preestablished accent and measure of blank verse; and there are the very irregular accent and measure of speaking intonation. I am never more pleased than when I can get them into strained relation. I like to drag and break the intonation across the metre as waves first comb and then break stumbling on the shingle.’ The drama of Wyeth's sonnets comes from this same interplay of rhythm and metre, as the sonnet is stretched to astonishing limits in the need to accommodate materials previously beyond its purview.

Gioia, finally, tempers his praise with the belief that 'the concluding sections of [Wyeth's sonnet sequence] feel inconclusive and anti-climactic': This Man's Army, he insists, 'is a strongly written, authentically detailed, and imaginatively engaging book that fails to reach its full poetic, historical or cultural potential.' Gioia wants the sonnet sequence to have a grander finale. The greatest sonnet sequences of all would struggle to pass such a test: Shakespeare's sonnets 153 and 154, for example, end the sequence with a whimper. But Wyeth ought to be defended on his own terms, because one point of his sequence is its understatement. The final sonnet ends on what seems like a minor key, but it makes the first mention of a new humanitarian disaster all the more potent: “Aw I’m not wounded Buddy—it’s just the flu.”

French Brothels in Wartime

A story about French brothels during the Second World War will have to serve as sufficient cause to write something about French brothels during the First. Robert Graves, in Goodbye to All That, reports that there were two kinds of brothels: a 'blue lamp' for officers and a 'red lamp' for men. Graves wonders wrily whether the Blue Lamp women 'had to show any particular qualifications for their higher social ranking'.

The best poem I've read about wartime brothels is a sonnet by John Allan Wyeth, an American poet of the First World War recently re-discovered by BJ Omanson and Dana Gioia. Wyeth's sole publication was This Man's Army: A War in Fifty-Odd Sonnets, a superb book to which I'll return in a future blogpost. Published in 1928, the book disappeared virtually without trace until being reissued to great acclaim last year.

The sonnet in question opens diligently enough as the girls 'defile' (rather than 'file') 'Into the sordid room'. They are described as 'dreary mimes, unhappy and impure'. But Wyeth is brilliant at stringing slangy interlingual idioms across sonnet lines; the brothel Madame's reply to the clients' request for champagne --- 'tout d'suite / Messieurs' --- is met hilariously with 'Toot sweet is right'. The final lines, as a girl makes her obligatory approach to the poet, plunge into desolate longing:

---"Allô, chéri"---a low voice sleek with guile---
here come her thin arms and the ancient lure
of pathos in her unfamiliar eyes.

This is made even more dreadful by the inescapable memory of Wyeth's opening sonnet, in which he says farewell to his mother before sailing for Europe:

our almost happy casual embrace,
your strange "A...dieu," and as you go away
my dreary smile and your appalling eyes.

The casual embrace with the mother becomes a casual embrace with that haunted girl, all the more powerfully prefigured by the mother's broken French. Appalling eyes at parting become unfamiliar eyes at a parodic reunion. What the poet wants is mother love, and he finds some horrible sexualised version of it in the brothel.