Yeah, I thought of that, too, Hal, but then, that's EVERY war....
Doug
On 27-Apr-09, at 2:40 PM, Halvard Johnson wrote:
> "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
>>
>
Douglas Barbour
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http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
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