When war poets come up, I think of those like Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg who wrote about its futility and cruelty.
Few people who saw battle had anything good to say about it. Alan Seeger, an American who died fighting for France in World War I, was one of the few.
When both world wars broke out, public opinion in the United States was against getting involved. Seeger was exasperated. He thought Americans should be willing to fight to defend the wronged.
His “Ode in Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen for France” argues that there are worse things than fighting and dying.
But by the death of these
Something that we can look upon with pride
Has been achieved, nor wholly
Can sneerers triumph in the charge they make
That from a war where Freedom was at stake
America withheld and, daunted, stood aside.
The lines seem strange to me, but I’m interested in a personality that, rather than being crushed by the experience of warfare, was fighting and still relishing the fight when he died.
• Sources and notes: Alan Seeger’s “Ode in Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen for France” is at the Poetry Foundation’s site here:
His nephew Pete Seeger, the folk singer, also wrote some lyrics that seem strange to me for different reasons.
This line of thought started with Alice Winn’s “The Sex Lives and War Deaths of Soldier Poets,” a review of Michael Korda’s Muse of Fire: World War I as Seen Through the Lives of the Soldier Poets in the April 15, 2024 edition of The New York Times. It’s here:
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