Readers may be surprised by some of the poets who are included. Did you know William Carlos Williams wrote a poem called "War, the Destroyer!" or that many women poets have taken war as a subject? Old Glory includes many fine examples, from Emily Dickinson on the Civil War, to party-girl Edna St. Vincent Millay in a somber mood brought on by WW2, to Denise Levertov's "What Were They Like?" about Vietnam: "It was reported their singing resembles the flight of moths in moonlight./Who can say? It is silent now;" to Carolyn Kizer writing of the Gulf War, "the whole green sky is dying." Native American poetry is represented by three heart-wrenching Indian War songs by the heroic Sitting Bull.
Hemingway called WW1, which killed 30 million by combat, disease or starvation, "the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth." Old Glory includes T.S. Eliot's ironic post-WW1 poem "Triumphal March," but missing in action is arguably the best expression of the flattened affect of shellshocked Europeans caused by that butchery, Eliot's "The Waste Land," dedicated to his friend, the French soldier Jean Verdenal, "mort aux Dardanelles." A more devasted view of "the war to end all wars" cannot be imagined, as Eliot's subtext asks "Is this what western civilization has led to?" Some of the book's poetry is anti-war; some is written by soldier-poets. Here's Randall Jarrell in "Losses," about WW2:
In bombers named for girls, we burned
The cities we had learned about in school-
Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among
The people we had killed and never seen.
Some of the weakest modern poems, in a formal sense, written by Robert Bly, Robert Creeley, Billy Collins and Quincy Troupe, transcend the banality of their imagery and language with epiphanic visions of self and other being equal. They are poems written with awareness that sees far beyond the simplistic opposition of Us Good, Them Evil.
In bombers named for girls, we burned
The cities we had learned about in school-
Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among
The people we had killed and never seen.
Some of the weakest modern poems, in a formal sense, written by Robert Bly, Robert Creeley, Billy Collins and Quincy Troupe, transcend the banality of their imagery and language with epiphanic visions of self and other being equal. They are poems written with awareness that sees far beyond the simplistic opposition of Us Good, Them Evil.
One expects a volume of war poems to deliver the sad news that the human race never changes, and that combat will continue into Star Wars and beyond, but this book is different. In it poets bear witness to the evolution of human consciousness, with compassion for both sides of conflicts and revulsion at war's destructiveness. Their poems bring hope. Here's George Oppen, in his WW2 poem "Survival: Infantry": "We were ashamed of our half life and our misery; we saw that everything/
had died."
And war poetry doesn't get more humane than that of Hayden Carruth, whose compassion embraces all innocents:
"The Birds of Vietnam"
Poisoned in your nests, starved
In the withered forests.
O mindless, heartless.
You never invented hell.
had died."
And war poetry doesn't get more humane than that of Hayden Carruth, whose compassion embraces all innocents:
"The Birds of Vietnam"
Poisoned in your nests, starved
In the withered forests.
O mindless, heartless.
You never invented hell.
