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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