“THE STEP OF IRON FEET”: FORMAL MOVEMENTS IN AMERICAN WORLD WAR II POETRY by RACHEL LYNN EDFORD A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of English and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2011 DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Rachel Lynn Edford Title: “The Step of Iron Feet”: Formal Movements in American World War II Poetry This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of English by: Karen Jackson Ford Chairperson John Gage Member Paul Peppis Member Cecilia Enjuto Rangel Outside Member and Kimberly Andrews Espy Vice President for Research & Innovation/Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded September 2011 ii © 2011 Rachel Lynn Edford iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Rachel Lynn Edford Doctor of Philosophy Department of English September 2011 Title: “The Step of Iron Feet”: Formal Movements in American World War II Poetry Approved: _______________________________________________ Karen Jackson Ford We have too frequently approached American World War II poetry with assumptions about modern poetry based on readings of the influential British Great War poets, failing to distinguish between WWI and WWII and between the British and American contexts. During the Second World War, the Holocaust and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki obliterated the line many WWI poems reinforced between the soldier’s battlefront and the civilian’s homefront, authorizing for the first time both civilian and soldier perspectives. Conditions on the American homefront—widespread isolationist and anti-Semitic attitudes, America’s late entry into the war, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese internment, and the African American “Double V Campaign” to fight fascism overseas and racism at home—were just some of the volatile conditions poets in the US grappled with during WWII. In their poems, war shapes and threatens the identities of civilians and soldiers, women and men, African Americans and Jews, and verse form itself becomes a weapon against war’s assault on identity. Charles Reznikoff, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Richard Wilbur mobilize and challenge the authority of traditional poetic forms to defend the self against social, political, and physical assaults. The objective, free-verse testimony form of iv Reznikoff’s long poem Holocaust (1975) registers his mistrust of lyric subjectivity and of the musical effects of traditional poetry. In Rukeyser’s free-verse and traditional-verse forms, personal experiences and public history collide to create a unifying poetry during wartime. Brooks, like Rukeyser, posits poetry’s ability to protect soldiers and civilians from war’s threat to their identities. In Brooks’s poems, however, only traditionally formal poems can withstand the war’s destruction. Wilbur also employs conventional forms to control war’s disorder. The individual speakers in his poems avoid becoming nameless war casualties by grounding themselves in military and literary history. Through a series of historically informed close readings, this dissertation illuminates a neglected period in the history of American poetry and argues that mid-century formalism challenges—not retreats from—twentieth-century atrocities. v CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Rachel Lynn Edford GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene University of Michigan-Dearborn, Dearborn Wayne State University, Detroit, MI DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy, English, 2011, University of Oregon Master of Arts, Liberal Studies, 2006, University of Michigan-Dearborn Master of Library and Information Science, 2003, Wayne State University Bachelor of Arts, English, 2001, Wayne State University AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: Twentieth-Century American Literature Poetry and Poetics PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Graduate Teaching Fellow, University of Oregon, 2006-11 Assistant Director of the Center for Teaching Writing, University of Oregon, 2009-10 GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: NeMLA Travel Award, NeMLA Graduate Student Caucus, 2011 Graduate School Research Award, University of Oregon, 2010-11 vi PUBLICATIONS: Edford, Rachel. “The Elegance of The Elegant Universe: Unity, Beauty, and Harmony in Brian Greene’s Populatization of Superstring Theory.” Public Understanding of Science 16.4 (2007): 441-54. vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to Professor Karen Ford for her diligent guidance and assistance in the preparation and revision of this manuscript. In addition, I wish to thank my dissertation committee members—Professors John Gage, Paul Peppis, and Cecilia Enjuto Rangel—for their invaluable advice on the project. To my family and friends, thank you for your constant support and encouragement. viii In loving memory of my grandparents George and Palmira Baresi ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. FORMAL MOVEMENTS IN AMERICAN WORLD WAR II POETRY ............. 1 Notes ...................................................................................................................... 16 II. TESTIFYING AGAINST THE LYRIC IN CHARLES REZNIKOFF’S HOLOCAUST POETRY ........................................................................................ 17 Notes ...................................................................................................................... 66 III. “WHERE FORM TENDS” IN MURIEL RUKEYSER’S WAR POEMS ............. 69 Notes ...................................................................................................................... 114 IV. FORM AND IDENTITY IN GWENDOLYN BROOKS’S WORLD WAR II POEMS ................................................................................................................. 118 Notes ...................................................................................................................... 168 V. THE FORMS OF HISTORY IN RICHARD WILBUR’S WAR POEMS ............. 171 Notes ...................................................................................................................... 221 REFERENCES CITED ................................................................................................ 224 x CHAPTER I FORMAL MOVEMENTS IN AMERICAN WORLD WAR II POETRY Gwendolyn Brooks concludes “Gay Chaps at the Bar,” her sonnet sequence about soldiers during World War II, with the portent of another approaching war: “The step / of iron feet again. And again wild” (75). The “iron feet” of the industrial war machine can be heard in the steps of soldiers parading to celebrate the end of WWII. The last poem‟s title, “the progress,” puns bitterly on the military parade, the post-war optimism, and the inevitable “progress” into another war. This jarring image ends the sequence on a menacing note: the soldiers have been reduced to automatons, while another war slouches toward America with the precision of machinery and the wildness of a beast. Clearly, Brooks is not hopeful that the Second World War will, at last, be the war to end all wars; but she preserves her faith in poetic “feet” to control the march of war‟s iron feet. Thus, and almost inexplicably, “the step of iron feet” is also the movement of metered poems and the scaffolding of stanzaic structures that support her depiction of war. War cuts down the confident and suave “gay chaps” to battle-weary soldiers who have lost their faith in love, God, and country at the same time that the sonnet elevates and preserves them. As is well known, Brooks would later dismiss her sonnets and other traditional verse forms as outdated, and most modernist poets between the wars would have agreed with her. But at this moment, Brooks and other British and American poets wanted less to make it new than to keep it steady in the face of the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the advent of the atomic age. 1 Many poets following WWII took up traditional verse forms, stepping into the poetical feet of the Great War trench poets. While civilian modernist poets sought freedom from past conventions through experimental forms during WWI, the soldier- poets tended to work in traditional forms, revising rather than rejecting those conventions and techniques. True, as David Perkins claims, “the English poets of the First World War began as Georgians, and their poetry gradually changed as they underwent the appalling conditions and experiences of combat in the trenches” (141-42). However, conventional forms feel the strain of war in Siegfried Sassoon‟s bitterly satiric ballads, Wilfred Owen‟s dissonant para-rhymes, and Edward Thomas‟s anti-pastoral elegies but do not entirely break from the past. Thus, in The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell argues that defining features of WWI poetry included the “constant reaching out towards traditional significance” and the “attempt to make some sense of the war in relation to inherited tradition” (57). Traditional forms provided an intelligible context for the trench poets‟ reports about an almost incomprehensible war. Their poems attacked earlier depictions of the glory and heroism of battle. Whereas the civilian poets had the time, freedom, and safety to create experimental poetry outside the confines of the trenches, the soldier-poets needed a stable form for their volatile experiences of modern war and their incendiary anti-war arguments. Though their formalism would be eclipsed by post-WWI avant-garde