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.

American Poets of the Second World War

From this distant perspective, the American attitude towards its war poets has always seemed perplexing. War poetry is something peculiarly English. Ask a literate American to name a war poet, and she is more likely to mention Owen than Whitman or Melville.

Recent years have seen the publication of a number of books which suggest that, at last, American awareness of its own war poetry may be growing. Lorrie Goldensohn's anthology of American war poetry demonstrated the extent of the tradition with poems from the colonial wars to Afghanistan; Cynthia Wachtell's War No More proved that it was the American Civil War which first challenged poets to write of industrialised slaughter; and the recent rediscovery of John Allan Wyeth has given Americans a Great War poet who can rank among the best of the Brits.

Diederik Oostdijk's new study, Among the Nightmare Fighters: American Poets of World War II, ought to inspire a new map of twentieth-century American poetry in which the poetry of war is no longer occluded. Until now, the 'middle generation' of poets, falling between Modernism and the various movements which came to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s (Confessionalism, the Beats, the Black Mountain), has been squeezed or altogether ignored: powerful though they are, the five lines of Randall Jarrell's 'The Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner' should not be a synecdoche for such a vast and diverse body of war poetry. Oostdijk's book retrieves into prominence a group of poets who were mostly (but not all) servicemen---not just Jarrell but Anthony Hecht, Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov, James Dickey, Robert Lowell, William Stafford, Lincoln Kirstein. Like the greatest of their English contempories, Keith Douglas, they were haunted by the examples of earlier war poets. Oostdijk takes the title of his first chapter from a comment made by Karl Shapiro in a letter home: 'Im [sic] no Wilfred Owen, darling'.

Oostdijk writes pellucid English like only a Dutchman can. He has a pitch-perfect ear for nuances of meaning: this is a learned and historically-informed study, but its greatest strength is in close readings. Those readings draw on vast reserves of research, and display an impressive knowledge of previous war poetry (particularly from the American Civil War and the Great War). Fighting his corner, Oostdijk is also convincing when it comes to giving reasons why American poetry of the war has been neglected, and he is not averse to attacking Modernism or New Criticism on behalf of his charges. The thoroughness and detail of Oostdijk's readings disguise the fact that, on the sly, his is a profoundly polemical study. It points out, for example, that his poets often 'contradict the American victory narrative'---which is a key reason for their neglect. Oostdijk quotes Michael C C Adams, author of the bitterly-titled history, The Best War Ever: America and World War II: '[the war] has been converted over time from a complex, problematic event, full of nuance and debatable meaning, to a simple, shining legend of the Good War.' Oostdijk's poets undermine that legend, and in doing so, their fate has been to go unheard. Thanks to Oostdijk's attention, the time has come to reassess their achievement and their legacy.

Cynthia Wachtell: War No More

Cynthia Wachtell's War No More comes with a handily descriptive subtitle: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature 1861-1914. Wachtell traces that impulse through many of the major American writers of the period: Melville, Whitman, Twain, William James, Hawthorne, Stephen Crane, etc. The Civil War, and the ways in which it is subsequently remembered, take up most of the book, although Wachtell gradually looks ahead to the technology-driven apocalypse of the First World War. She is especially effective at describing the power of weaponry during the period and its increasing ability to mutilate and destroy the human body. The extent to which the poetry of 1914-18 was foreshadowed by writings from and about the American Civil War is conspicuous throughout.

My chief criticism of what is otherwise a valuable and highly recommended book is that Wachtell sometimes misjudges her audience: she says what she is going to say, says it, then says what she has said, running through this pattern several times in each chapter. Even so, this is a noble fault, which at least makes the argument easy to follow. Part of her case is that the anti-war impulse, during the Civil War, is self-censoring. Whitman, for example, saves his most horrific and sceptical descriptions of the Civil War for notebooks and poem drafts, and does not suffer them into print. And Melville, more outspoken than Whitman, is largely ignored (according to Wachtell) because of the unpopularity of his views.

Short chapters on such huge authors cannot go far, which is why Wachtell is most impressive when writing about a lesser-known figure like John William De Forest, who served in the Civil War, and regretted not having taken part in 'one of the greater battles, such as Gettysburg or Chickamauga', but who wrote with unusual candour about the experience of combat. His novel of 1867, Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty, loudly broadcasts its author's own loyalties even through its title, but Wachtell's account and sensitive quotations suggest that it amounts to more than a victor's smugness. For example, a soldier is shot while reading a newspaper: 'The ball had struck him under the chin, traversed the neck, and cut the spinal column where it joins the brain, making a fearful hole through which the blood had already soaked his great-coat.'

Wachtell expertly demonstrates how the great authors expose the pro-war platitudes of the age. Given that her study stops at 1914, she has less need to consider the possibility of anti-war platitudes. Her conclusion acknowledges a general shift in the American consciousness:

As a nation of readers, we have gone from idolizing the valiant hero to idolizing the alienated antihero. We have gone from being a nation of romantics to a nation of skeptics. Even so, wars continue to be fought.

While puzzling over this paradox, Wachtell seems to imply that Americans today are ethically better and more enlightened (at least in respect of attitudes to war) than their 19th-century predecessors. Yet 'Americans continue, all too frequently, to engage in war'. Why should a democratic nation consistently frustrate --- and have the power to frustrate --- the will of its people? Could it be that, for all our fine rhetoric and our hand-wringing artworks, we share our humanity with our ancestors? Homer represented the pity of war and the glory of war as equal and mutually-reliant truths. There may be times, such as during the Civil War, when one of those truths needs to be emphasised in order to address an existing imbalance in public discourse. But I am not persuaded that anti-war writers are wiser than Homer.

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.

Herman Melville: 'Shiloh'

The Battle of Shiloh, in Tennessee, took place on 6-7 April 1862. Casualty levels were unprecedented: the 3500 men who died there amounted to more than the United States had lost in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812 and the Mexican War combined.

As befits its subtitle, Herman Melville's 'requiem' is remarkably non-partisan. Both sides seem to have been deceived; how modern that parenthetical line sounds, both in tone and sentiment. Melville gives the fatally wounded the opportunity to overcome their enmity. Americans all, they live as foe and die as friends: the schisms of civil war are healed in deaths which transform churchyard into graveyard. That the battlefield should have been a site of Christian worship emphasises the appalling costs of this fratricide as well as the possibilities for its redress.

Shiloh
A Requiem

Skimming lightly, wheeling still,
   The swallows fly low
Over the field in clouded days,
   The forest-field of Shiloh---
Over the field where April rain
Solaced the parched ones stretched in pain
Through the pause of night
That followed the Sunday fight
   Around the church of Shiloh---
The church so lone, the log-built one,
That echoed to many a parting groan
      And natural prayer
   Of dying foemen mingled there---
Foemen at morn, but friends at eve---
   Fame or country least their care:
(What like a bullet can undeceive!)
   But now they lie low,
While over them the swallows skim,
   And all is hushed at Shiloh.

Walt Whitman and the American Civil War

Walt Whitman c. 1860

Here is an extract from John Keegan's latest book, The American Civil War. Its subject is the medical response to the battlefields' carnage, and Walt Whitman's role in nursing the casualties. And here is a strong essay on the same subject by Angel Price.

Whitman was not a soldier, and did not witness any fighting, but his experiences in the field hospitals inspired him to write some of the most important and influential poetry of the nineteenth century. Kipling called him his favourite poet; Gurney was overwhelmed by the 'flood' of his work, and spent years studying, rewriting, and setting to music Whitman's poetry; Rosenberg argued that Shakespeare had 'paved the way for Whitman', with the Bard's 'freedom', 'daring' and 'inspiration' becoming 'in Whitman's hands... a roadway right through humanity'. Those poets' emphasis on experience and witness was already found in Whitman: 'I now doubt whether one can get a fair idea of what this war practically is... without some such experience as this I am having.' Whitman's influence was also felt in prose writings of the Great War. The nurses' memoirs of Vera Brittain and Mary Borden are noble variations on Specimen Days.

Drum Taps (1865), Whitman's poems of the war, became incorporated into the 1867 edition of that greatest and most protean of 19th-century poetry volumes, Leaves of Grass. The war poems are, among other things, an attempt to do justice to the dying: 'every case', Whitman noted, 'is a tragic poem, an epic, a romance, a pensive and absorbing book, if it were only written.' Here is the final poem of the section, 'Not Youth Pertains to Me':

NOT youth pertains to me,
Nor delicatesse—I cannot beguile the time with talk;
Awkward in the parlor, neither a dancer nor elegant;
In the learn'd coterie sitting constrain'd and still—for learning inures not to me;
Beauty, knowledge, fortune, inure not to me—yet there are two things inure to me;
I have nourish'd the wounded, and sooth'd many a dying soldier;
And at intervals I have strung together a few songs,
Fit for war, and the life of the camp.

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.

Is there an American War Poetry?

My post on Gerald Dawe's Irish War Poetry made me think about what is, as its title suggests, the nearest thing to a U.S. counterpart: American War Poetry, edited by Lorrie Goldensohn. War, like nothing else, obliges an urgent consideration of topoi of national identity; at the same time, most languages (and therefore most literatures) cross national boundaries. To what extent, then, does it make sense to think of war poetry in national terms? Is there an American war poetry?

Having published a book titled Modern English War Poetry, I am in no position to be dismissive about national categories. Had I referred to British rather than English, I would still be writing it now. All books need to end somewhere, and as I had a large temporal range --- from the Boer War to the present --- I felt entitled to narrow the geographical focus. But there was a political imperative as well. Whatever the various reactions of English poets to the nation and their government, Scottish and Welsh nationalisms take a fundamentally different attitude both to Westminster and to established symbols of Englishness. More than that, I wanted to claim that the ways in which English war poets talk to each other during the last century do constitute a tradition; not a simple tradition, not even a linear tradition, but a tradition perhaps in the sense of a shared awareness, community or engagement. For example, when Keith Douglas decorates a photograph of himself in his army finery with the words 'Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori', he looks to assault a poetic tradition (while reinstating an allegiance to an Horatian one); but that breaking is itself an acknowledgement and a continuation of a drama played through Wilfred Owen's poetry. Owen uses his predecessors to create a discordant antiphony; Douglas uses Owen in the same way.

I am not sure that the same can accurately be said of American war poetry. Goldensohn doesn't say it, although the book's blurb does: 'While the birth of a national identity is documented in early poems, the anthology also conveys the growing sophistication of a uniquely American style.' Reading the many wonderful and not-so-wonderful poems from the eighteenth-century Colonial Wars to (many would argue) those new colonial wars in the Persian Gulf, I am not convinced that the anthology's contents support that claim. Poetry is not a branch of science: it does not progress. And talk of a 'uniquely American style' risks belittling a nation which upholds among its self-evident truths the freedom of the individual; the freedom, that is, to choose to be different. America is nothing if it is not various; it seems too vast to have one 'style'.

None of this detracts from Goldensohn's anthology, which is quite appropriately a collection of the best war poems written out of a particular nation. War poetry does not seem to be part of a national psyche in the States as it is in England; there is no Yankee Brooke or Owen. The best poets in the book --- Emerson, Whitman, Stevens, Frost, Bishop, etc. --- are what we might term occasional war poets. Whitman (as always) comes closest to an exception, and the story of how Drum Taps influenced English war poets like Gurney and Rosenberg has still not been fully told. Whitman is, with 8 poems, the most heavily-represented poet in Goldensohn's anthology, and as war poet he stands head and shoulders above the others. Yet when we think of Whitman's crowning achievements, we probably think first of 'Song of Myself', 'I Sing the Body Electric', or the elegy for Lincoln.

Goldensohn's introductions to each war are excellent, but one line made me smile: 'The United States is still considered the key to the victory of 1918.' Far be it for me to want to start a transatlantic bunfight at a time when we British attempt to salvage a 'special relationship' from our position of utter powerlessness, but this comes close to the Oh What a Lovely War version of history. The hundreds of thousands of American soldiers who fought in the war certainly didn't harm the Allied cause... and yet it would be more diplomatic to drop the definite article. American entry into the war was, undeniably, 'key'.

The Cow in Apple Time --- War Poem or Bull?

Any reader of Robert Frost's poetry must, sooner or later, come to terms with what he called its 'ulteriority' --- its ability to say one thing and mean another. What, then, does this poem mean?

The Cow in Apple Time

Something inspires the only cow of late

To make no more of a wall than an open gate,

And think no more of wall-builders than fools.

Her face is flecked with pomace and she drools

A cider syrup. Having tasted fruit,

She scorns a pasture withering to the root.

She runs from tree to tree where lie and sweeten

The windfalls spiked with stubble and worm-eaten.

She leaves them bitten when she has to fly.

She bellows on a knoll against the sky.

Her udder shrivels and the milk goes dry.

Frost wrote the poem in England in late 1914. At readings, he always explained that his 'heroic cow' was inspired by the group of animals at the base of the Albert Memorial (see above), having forgotten or perhaps failed to notice that the 'cow' in question is being ridden by Europa. A more obvious source is Frost's own 'Mending Wall', in which walls between neighbo(u)rs are considered especially important 'where there are cows'.

Frost thought about walls in bodily terms: 'One chief disposition of life living is cell walls breaking and cells walls making'. He also thought about them on an international level. Take, as one example among many, 'Education by Poetry', when he resists arguments against nationalism: 'Look! First I want to be a person. And I want you to be a person, and then we can be as interpersonal as you please. We can pull each other's noses --- do all sorts of things. But, first of all, you have got to have the personality. First of all, you have got to have the nations and then they can be as international as they please with each other.'

Frost's cow is transgressive. She crosses boundaries to taste forbidden fruit, and having been driven back to her proper territory, she suffers the consequences of her greed, losing the ability to nourish her own offspring. In late 1914, one ulterior meaning would have clearly presented itself. Frost's subsequent omission of Europa is the most revealing of disguises. What is the poem about, if not the outbreak of hostilities on the continent which takes its name from that mythical heroine?

It is about a cow which gorges itself in an orchard. That much, at least, we can agree on.

Birth of a Nation

While all eyes are on the United States, Ralph Waldo Emerson's poem memorialising the start of the American Revolutionary War seems a fitting subject. The 'rude bridge' mentioned in the opening line is the North Bridge in Concord, where in 1775 a group of local patriots resisted a much larger company of British army regulars. Emerson's brother reports that the poem was to be sung to the tune of the 'Old Hundred'.

Concord Hymn
Sung at the Completion of the Battle Monument, July 4, 1837

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set to-day a votive stone;
That memory may their dead redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.


Robert Frost loved this poem (as he loved so much of Emerson's writing). His patriotic poem 'The Gift Outright', which he read at Kennedy's Inauguration, may well be remembering Emerson's 'Concord Hymn' as it records the transition of Americans from 'colonials' to liberation and independence: 'The deed of gift was many deeds of war'.