Graves and Owen reflect the war as it came to be remembered, but their view did not match many people’s emotions as it continued, or even after it ended. The fact that Seeger had this romantic vision of war in 1914, and still held it in 1916, is what gives his work value. To him, it was “the supreme experience,” a part of nature humans were destined to take part in. In December 1914, while others still harbored hope they might make it home by Christmas, Seeger wrote to his father that the “war will probably last a long while.” He described being “harried like this by an invisible enemy and standing up against the dangers of battle without any of its exhilaration or enthusiasm.” This knowledge didn’t dent his outlook of the war. He witnessed the truth of the war, sometimes before others who are remembered for their cold honesty. He saw what they saw, recognized it and looked elsewhere. The vision of the war that Graves and Owen presented was secondary to Seeger. ![]() It’s not that Seeger was an inadequate craftsman. They felt that readers should see the depth that European society had sunk to in World War I. Knowing what they knew, the literary crowd found Seeger’s poems antiquated, if not outright dishonest. Seeger is something still less: not a writer who faded away to acclaim of a ceremonial sort, but one who became unfashionable to even the most hospitable critics of the postwar years. The war’s cultural history and its actual one have become entwined over time so that the work of these two poets are more memorials - stone scrolls that speak of death by gas and sightless charges over the edge of trenches - than that of writers with whom modern-day readers genuinely engage. It’s no coincidence: Their poems helped form that picture. Their depictions of life in the trenches match up with the images most commonly associated with World War I. Poets don’t command much attention these days, but you can still hear Owen’s and Graves’s poems on television specials about the war. The poem ends with its title and war’s enduring lie: “Dulce et Decorum est/Pro patria mori.” It is sweet and honorable to die for one’s country. Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud/Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, - ” is what’s left of one who doesn’t secure his gas mask quickly enough. “His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin. Owen describes “Knock-kneed” soldiers “coughing like hags” before a gas attack hits. Death in their poems has none of the glimmer Seeger gives it. Not like those of Wilfred Owen or Robert Graves, two of the most popular poets of a war whose verse defined its cultural legacy. You don’t find much Seeger among the poems revered for their chronicling of World War I. The romanticism that colored Seeger’s experience of life extended to the war itself. The Good War the narrative that crescendos with a single battle, with every piece in its exact position a sense of rightness in who makes it back and who does not - all fictions. ![]() Not the type whose foundations give future scholars the approximate location of truths, but a total fiction. As if a writer, resting on some cosmic ridge over the lines at Hulluch or Ypres, could lay eyes on any Tommy or poilu (as the French soldiers were called) and transform him into the next Achilles. ![]() While he lived, Seeger described a romantic’s war. Six months later, when Seeger’s collected poems were published, it bore the title “Sonnet XII.” A more illuminating one would be: “His Last.” Thirteen days after he wrote to his godmother, Seeger was killed in battle. The poem he mailed on June 21 had no title. From 1914 to 1916, the poet passed along stories and verse from the front to readers of The New Republic, The New York Sun and other newspapers. ![]() Seeger experienced World War I and its destruction, calculated and comprehensive, a few years before anyone back home in America did. Not in age, but in the way you might say “young” in place of “naïve” or “immature.” “Sentimental” comes closer, but it isn’t fair, either. The letter writer is still young, you might say. The sentences in the letter are short, stilted, like the ones a parent might hear after asking her child how school was that day. Nine sentences and 14 lines: an update from a tiny, unidentified village to the rear of the Western Front, and a sonnet. Alan Seeger, an American volunteer in the French Foreign Legion, encloses a poem with a letter to his godmother.
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