American Literature in the Twentieth Century Dana Gioia John Allen Wyeth: Soldier Poet The remarkable poetry of John portant positions in other Europe- Allan Wyeth nearly vanished for an literatures. French literature has a simple reason. The author pub- Charles Peguy, Guillaume Apolli- lished only one book, This Man’s naire, and Blaise Cendrars (who lost Army (1928), and then abandoned his right arm in the Second Battle of the practice of poetry. The book Champagne). Italian poetry has Eu- received excellent reviews and sold genio Montale, Giuseppe Ungaretti, well enough to be reprinted in 1929 and Gabriella D’Annunzio. German just as the Depression brought the poetry has Georg Trakl, August great decade of American Modern- Stramm, and Gottfried Benn. 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 War 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 poets. 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 United States 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, Joyce Kilmer and Alan Seeger, and the slaughter of nineteen million young by the trauma of trench warfare 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- British literature with significant writers died at 28, is remembered for one short ed the classic traditions of war literature— such as Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, Sieg- poem, his romantic self-elegy, “I Have a individual heroism, military glory, and vir- fried Sassoon, David Jones, Ivor Gurney, Rendezvous with Death”. Kilmer, who died tuous leadership. Writers struggled for a Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, 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 irony 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 British poetry 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 sonnet 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 sonnets 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 Italy 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 Ezra Pound, who spent the by place, through wartime France toward foreign landscape and languages. war years in London, 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 Verdun, the site of the longest battle Omanson was able to confirm the location of the War in which over 300,000 French An American War Poet The importance of John Allan Wyeth’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? Armistice, an American poet takes his place with the front rank of the War Poet’s pa- “Don’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 New York City in 1894, he was the third “Thank God you’re takin’ a bath.” and last child of a noted surgeon, Civil War 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 Marion Sims Wyeth, like you.” had just graduated). At Princeton the young Wyeth studied literature and languages. He “Air raid!” wrote for the Nassau Literary Magazine and We ran out into the square, became friends with fellow students, includ- ing Edmund Wilson 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 Lieutenant 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 Germans 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, Rhode Island, Wyeth told slate— the Providence Journal-Bulletin that he had and low green banks 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.