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Home , Dana Gioia, John Allan Wyeth (poet), War poet

in the Twentieth Century John Allen Wyeth: Soldier

The remarkable of John portant positions in other - Allan Wyeth nearly vanished for an literatures. has a simple reason. The author pub- Charles Peguy, Guillaume Apolli- lished only one book, This Man’s naire, and (who lost Army (1928), and then abandoned his right arm in the Second Battle of the practice of poetry. The book Champagne). has Eu- received excellent reviews and sold genio Montale, , well enough to be reprinted in 1929 and Gabriella D’Annunzio. German just as the Depression brought the poetry has , August great decade of American Modern- Stramm, and . ism to an end. Wyeth headed to Eu- These scarred survivors reshaped rope where he studied painting. He the sensibility of modern verse. The enjoyed some success as an artist. Great also changed literature in He even composed music, but he another brutal way; it killed count- never published another poem. less young writers. Obscurity is not an unusual out- The War did not have the same come for . Few writers escape impact on American literature be- oblivion. What makes Wyeth’s case cause our national experience of the unusual is that after eighty years of conflict was less prolonged and dev- total neglect, he came back to seri- astating. The was at ous attention in 2008 with the re- war for less than two years, and actu- publication of his This Man’s Army al combat lasted only a few months. in the University of South Caroli- Our poetic legacy from the Great na’s “Great War Series”. The vol- War is negligible in comparison to ume convinced everyone involved the British or French. Most of the in the project that Wyeth was the work by American soldier poets was most notable American poet of the conventional—traditional sentiments First World War. expressed in flowery language and old-fashioned forms. The work of Poetry and the Great War our soldier poets feels remote from The First World War changed Eu- the horrific reality. ropean literature forever. The hor- The two best known U.S. solider ror of modern mechanized warfare poets, and , and the slaughter of nineteen million young by the trauma of and indis- were both killed in battle. They brought a men and innocent civilians traumatized criminate massacre. The “War Poets” con- generalized and old-fashioned approach to the European imagination. For poets, the stitute an imperative presence in modern their small body of war poems. Seeger, who unprecedented scale of violence annihilat- with significant writers died at 28, is remembered for one short ed the classic traditions of war literature— such as , , Sieg- poem, his romantic self-, “I Have a individual heroism, military glory, and vir- fried Sassoon, Jones, , Rendezvous with Death”. Kilmer, who died tuous leadership. Writers struggled for a , , and Isaac at 31, was the young star of American Cath- new idiom commensurate with their apoc- Rosenberg. Their work, which combined olic letters, but his gentle, populist style was alyptic personal experience. European Mod- stark realism and bitter with a sense of unsuited for the brutality of the modern ernism emerged from the trenches of the tragic futility, altered the history of English battlefield. None of Kilmer’s wartime verses Western Front. literature. are read today; his reputation survives on especially was transformed Similar cohorts of war poets occupy im- poems written before he enlisted. As war StAR March/April 2020 page 4 poets, Seeger and Kilmer are minor figures This Man’s Army: A War in Fifty-Odd Son- and provide dates for nearly every event de- by even the most generous standards. nets tells the story of what happened to scribed in the book. The best American writing about the Wyeth and the 33rd Division. The volume is Wyeth adds to the documentary feel of Great War is odd in two ways. First, it ar- a linear narrative told through fifty-five lyr- the poems by experimenting with language. rived years after the war, mostly as prose ic moments each cast in form. The He mixes English, French, and German fiction from writer such as Ernest Heming- originality of the book is impressive. There with Army slang. Wyeth may have borrowed way, John Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings, and is nothing like it in American literature— the notion of a polyglot poem from Pound Willa Cather. Second, none of the major either in terms of the individual or and Eliot, but he uses the technique in a writers were actual combatants, though the design of the total sequence. This Man’s less intimidating way. The poems have the Hemingway was wounded in while Army is not simply a narrative; it is a poet- quality of reportage heightened into lyric running a mobile canteen as a Red Cross ic documentary chronicling the journey form. They capture the odd experience of ambulance driver. Likewise poets such as of Wyeth’s National Guard division, place an English-speaking army surrounded by T. S. Eliot and , who spent the by place, through wartime toward foreign landscape and languages. war years in , reflected the War’s im- the German border. Each poem describes Here is one sonnet in which the narrator pact mostly indirectly in the dark vision of an actual event in a real place. The poems on horseback comes to one of the ruined their postwar poems. are so specific that military historian B. J. forts of , the site of the longest battle Omanson was able to confirm the location of the War in which over 300,000 French An American The importance of ’s work is that it fills a gap in American liter- ature. Here at last was a soldier poet who could be read on equal terms with the best War in Heaven of his British contemporaries. Wyeth’s work is memorable, innovative, and distinctive. There is nothing quite like it in American A reek of steam—the bath-house rang with cries. literature. As Jon Stallworthy, editor of The “Come across with the soap.” Oxford Book of War Poetry and biographer of Wilfred Owen, declared, “At long last, “Like hell, what makes you think marking the ninetieth anniversary of the it’s yours? , an American poet takes his place with the front rank of the War Poet’s pa- “’t turn off the water, that ain’t fair rade.” I’m all covered with soap.” John Allen Wyeth Jr. was the privileged son of an affluent and talented family. Born “Hurry up, get out of the way.” in in 1894, he was the third “Thank God you’re takin’ a bath.” and last child of a noted surgeon, veteran, and poet. Wyeth grew up in a “He wants to surprise cultured household and attended the Law- us.” renceville School before entering Princeton in 1911 (from which his older brother, the “Oh is that so, well anyway I don’t stink celebrated architect , like you.” had just graduated). At Princeton the young Wyeth studied literature and languages. He “Air raid!” wrote for the Nassau and We ran out into the square, became friends with fellow students, includ- ing and F. Scott Fitzger- naked and cold like souls on Judgment Day. ald. His yearbook declared him “undecided Over us, white clouds blazoned on blue skies, about his future occupation”. After graduation, Wyeth drifted—un- and a green balloon on fire—we watched it shrink like his diligent and pragmatic father and into flame and a fall of smoke. Around us, brute brother. He taught French in Arizona, then returned to graduate school at Princeton. guns belching puffs of shrapnel in the air, When the U.S. entered the Great War, he where one plane swooping like a bird of prey enlisted as a Second in the 33rd Division of the American Expeditionary spat fire into a dangling parachute. Force. His fluency in French secured him a position in the Interpreters Corps. On May 16, 1918 Wyeth’s division boarded the USS —John Allen Wyeth Mount Vernon in Hoboken, New Jersey and sailed to France. StAR March/April 2020 page 5 and were killed. The poem be- attended a Presbyterian prep school, but he gins as reportage but ends in a momentary died a committed Catholic. So little docu- vision of resurrection as the fort itself cries mentation has survived from his post-war out in French “Let the dead rise”: life that it is impossible at present to date his conversion. In his later years he com- PORT DE LANDRECOURT: posed sacred music. When his Missa Prima ABOVE VERDUN was premiered in 1974 by a 65-voice choir for the centenary of St. Edward’s Church An autumn ridge of dust and rust and in Providence, , Wyeth told slate— the Providence Journal-Bulletin that he had and low green along a wet grey begun the work twenty years earlier. That re- sky. mark suggests he was already a Catholic by Deep walls and bastions in a moat of the early 1950s. It seems clear, however, that grass. his attraction to Catholicism was nurtured S’ENSEVELIR SOUS LES RUINES by France where he fought as a soldier and DU FORT later studied painting. LUTOUT QUE DE SE RENDRE This Man’s Army describes the landscape above the gate. of war, but the narrator is nonetheless alert My horse clatters on to the drawbridge, to ubiquitous presence of French Catholi- and a shy cism. It may be that Wyeth himself was not young sentry smiles and will not let me fully conscious of his fascination with the pass, faith, which he rarely expressed as overtly “on ne visite pas?” Wyeth also experiments with the meter as in the visionary Verdun sonnet. Still, he “Sans permission?—alors, of the sonnet. He combines the two most is constantly drawn to the sacred. From the Je le regrette”—we grin and separate. common metrical systems of English verse— troop train he watches “the black cathedral Verdun below—where all those ruins traditional lines of iambic pentameter and spires / of Chartres against a low-hung lazy lie. loose five stress most commonly used in moon”. He laments the destruction of the And in my heart a love, that almost popular spoken verse. churches he visits on the Western Front. kills The effect is perfect. It allows Wyeth to Two small episodes suggest the quiet force to see her, gashed and militant—a tighten or loosen the lines as he sees fit. of Catholicism in the apocalyptic landscape mass Few literary “experiments” work. This of wartime France. In “MOLLIENS-AU- of wreckage crying out, “Debout les Man’s Army did. The shifting rhythms allow BOIS: THE VILLAGE ROAD”, Wyeth morts” Wyeth to make sudden jumps of tone or makes his way alone down a dark country to all the souls that haunt her tragic perspective without ever losing the reader. road while an artillery battle rages in the dis- hills. tance. Coming upon a roadside shrine, he Wyeth and Catholicism bares his head to “the shrine / that hallows Even in this single sonnet, Wyeth demon- Wyeth was raised as an Episcopalian and all this stretch of road for me”. strates his dexterous originality in both In another poem, Wyeth meets two sol- sound and typography. He uses capital diers carrying a gas victim through the bat- letters to replicate the French military pa- tlefield. He describes the scene tellingly, triotic sign: “BURY YOURSELF IN THE “We passed / two soldiers, pain-white, and RUINS OF THE FORT RATHER THAN a man they bore / between, blind twisting SURRENDER.” The tragic irony of that head and drunken knees— / like Christ.” statement would not have been lost on the The sonnet’s title, “CHIPPILY RIDGET: poet. He likewise uses punctuation to create THROUGH THE VALLEY”, which alludes subtle effects. Though rhymed and metrical, to Psalm 23, shows Wyeth’s intent to frame the sonnet incorporates the visual effects of the documentary sonnet in religious terms . as a journey through the land of death. The attentive reader will also notice that What these details suggest is not that his Verdun poem is not a standard sonnet Wyeth converted as a young man, only in either the English or Italian tradition. that his experiences in France began a pro- For This Man’s Army, Wyeth invented a cess that eventually led him to the Roman new scheme—ABCD ABCD ABE Church. The journey must have been com- CDE—unlike any other in the form’s sev- plicated. Wyeth was almost certainly gay, en hundred year history. He also omits the although no documentation survives con- conventional stanza breaks common to the cerning his sexual orientation. What we do printed forms of both Shakespearean and know is that by late middle age, he was a Petrarchan sonnets. Instead, he arranges the serious Catholic. His personal journey re- lines differently from poem to poem as the sembles that of another war poet, Siegfried individual piece dictates. Sassoon, who was homosexual in his early StAR March/April 2020 page 6 years, but eventually married and converted Scottish painter Duncan Grant, a member eighty-six. His obituaries recognized him as to Catholicism (prompted by Father Ronald of the Bloomsbury Group, and then for six a noted artist; none mentioned his poetry. Knox). Sassoon’s biography is lavishly doc- years he undertook formal instruction with “Unique” is a word mostly misused in umented; Wyeth’s is not. We will probably Jean Marchand at the Academie Moderne in , but the term precisely de- never know the details of his inner life. . Working in a post-impressionist style, scribes Wyeth’s position in American poet- Wyeth achieved modest success as a painter. ry. His was the one truly contemporary voice The Missing Years He exhibited his work in Paris in the 1930s among the soldier poets of the Great War. There is little documentation on Wyeth af- and later participated in three biennials of Wyeth is not a major author—his literary ter Armistice. He returned to Princeton to contemporary American paintings at the career was too short. But his innovative col- do graduate work in Romance Languages. Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, lection, This Man’s Army, nonetheless stands He soon won a traveling fellowship to study D.C. He sold paintings through a New York as the major work of American in . After a brief return to Prince- gallery, but he often received financial help poetry. Perhaps unpublished work by Wyeth ton, he returned to Europe. He disappears from his well-to-do brother. will surface in the future to expand his leg- for several years. In 1926 he wrote his ac- Wyeth returned to the U.S. when World acy. In the meantime, the life of this poly- ademic advisor from , Italy to drop War II broke out and served in the U.S. mathic artist provides a singular episode in his doctoral studies. “I have always desired Coast Guard. After the War, he had an itin- the history of modern Catholic letters. above all things”, he wrote, “to try my hand erant existence in Europe and America. In at literature.” It was surely no coincidence 1974 he was living in Providence where his that Rapallo’s most famous American resi- Missa Prima was performed. By then he had dent was Ezra Pound. Wyeth’s modernist also joined a small circle of Rhode Island Dana Gioia, an internationally acclaimed poet revision of the sonnet suggests he learned Catholic artists and . In 1979 he and writer, is a former California from Pound to “make it new”. moved into a family house in Skillman, New and was Chairman of the National Endowment In 1932 Wyeth studied art briefly with the Jersey. He died there in 1981 at the age of of the Arts from 2003 until 2009.

New Voices New Poetry in English Greg Lobas

Peter in Chains Coarse-robed and manacled. Heavy links drag On a damp stone floor, The simple clinking music of sacrifice. Truth is chained. Contrivance walks free.

The body is made of earth and water. Dreams, of water and wind. Angels, wind and fire. Peter awakens to the patter of his footsteps on the piazza, blinks himself aware for today he’s been spared.

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