yeah, ok, big olaf. should have mentioned it, but not exactly on a par with
the enormous room.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Halvard Johnson" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, April 27, 2009 4:40 PM
Subject: Re: Great War poetry: Brit / Yank
"I sing of Olaf glad and big . . ."
Check it out, bj.
HJ
"The secret of managing is to keep the guys
who hate you away from the guys who are
undecided."
--Casey Stengel
Halvard Johnson
================
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On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 3:33 PM, bj omanson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Thanks Mark, Doug & Hal, I appreciate the responses.
>
> My question was "Any opinions as to why America produced no poets
> comparable to the British poets during WWI? American novelists produced a
> significant body of literature related to the war, so why not the poets?"
>
> I should have specified that I meant poets who had served in some capacity
> in the war. That would exclude Eliot & Pound, but would include Cummings.
> And Cummings did have a significant literary response to the war, only it
> was in prose fiction, not poetry.
>
> There were a number of American participants in the war who later became
> poets of note, but who wrote little or no poetry in direct response to the
> war, including Cummings, John Peale Bishop, Malcolm Cowley and Archibald
> MacLeish (who wrote a small body of war poems of no great importance).
>
> Yes, it is certainly true that the British and American experience of the
> war was vastly different. Not only did many more Brits serve, and for much
> longer, but the British homefront was deeply affected by the war, while
> the
> American homefront was scarcely affected at all. Nonetheless, the finest
> American novels from the war stand comparison with the finest French,
> British and German novels. It is only in poetry that the Yanks fall short.
>
> I think you are right, Mark, that the AEF was composed mostly of
> less-educated men, but -- more so than in most other American wars --
> highly-educated men were drawn into military service during WWI in large
> numbers. If you look into the "War Books" of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and
> other ivy league colleges, the numbers of students, professors and alumni
> who served in the war runs into the many hundreds in each case. You
> wouldn't find anything like that these days.
>
> In any case, whatever the differences between the American and British
> experience of the war, the American experience was sufficient to produce a
> sizeable body of significant fiction, but almost nothing comparable in
> poetry.
>
> Why would this be the case? Just a fluke, or is there something intrinsic
> to poetry which, as far as Americans are concerned, makes it unsuitable to
> rendering the experience of war? Why did Cummings write a novel about the
> war instead of a series of poems?
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Mark Weiss" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2009 11:19 AM
> Subject: Re: Great War poetry: Brit / Yank
>
>
> There were three times as many British soldiers in WWI, and they
> fought 3 times as long. I suspect as well that the US expeditionary
> force was heavily weighted towards a less-educated class base, and
> most poets weren't working-class. In Britain if you could walk you served.
>
> Mark
>
>
> Interesting question; but I have no idea....
>
> Except the Brits went in all full of the joy of war early & then
> lived, some of them, long enough to find out how wrong they were....
>
> (& you're ignoring Pound & Eliot, who didn't 'go to war' but certainly
> responded to it...; not 'war poets' though.)
>
> Doug
>
>
> Also ignored is E. E. Cummings.
>
> Hal
>
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