The Poet-Soldier Who Went to His Grave With a Romantic Vision of World War I

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/27/magazine/ww1-poetry-alan-seeger.html

Version 0 of 1.

June 21, 1916. Pvt. Alan Seeger, an American volunteer in the French Foreign Legion, encloses a poem with a letter to his godmother. Nine sentences and 14 lines: an update from a tiny, unidentified village to the rear of the Western Front, and a sonnet. The sentences in the letter are short, stilted, like the ones a parent might hear after asking her child how school was that day. “Fine hot summer weather. The big attacks will come soon now. . . . I am twenty-eight years old tomorrow.”

The letter writer is still young, you might say. 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. Seeger experienced World War I and its destruction, calculated and comprehensive, a few years before anyone back home in America did. 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. The poem he mailed on June 21 had no title. 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.

While he lived, Seeger described a romantic’s war. 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. It’s a myth, you know. Not the type whose foundations give future scholars the approximate location of truths, but a total fiction. 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. The romanticism that colored Seeger’s experience of life extended to the war itself.

The words of “Sonnet XII” belong to a poet-soldier writing in the first half of the Great War. The clouds are “rosy-tinted.” Keep looking up, and you’ll notice the “depths of the azure eastern sky.” The war is mentioned only in passing on the sixth line, and by then it’s a memory. “The cannon’s note,” Seeger prematurely recalls, “has ceased.” That forward glance is a rare concession, a tempting of the Fates; most of Seeger’s war poems describe a momentary state of peace — quicker than a gunshot, both part of the war and separate from it — before the battle once again rumbles forward. He didn’t often dare to contemplate the way it would end. In his most widely acclaimed work, “I Have a Rendezvous With Death . . . ,” life on the battlefield and the moment of death characteristically meet.

It may be he shall take my hand

And lead me into his dark land

And close my eyes and quench my breath —

It may be I shall pass him still.

This was President John F. Kennedy’s favorite poem, according to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis — though that fact doesn’t seem to be recorded in his published papers. Rather, it was an intimate favorite, his love for it recognized through the look on his face while it was recited. Onassis thought it reminded him of his brother Joe, who died in the Second World War.

You don’t find much Seeger among the poems revered for their chronicling of World War I. Not like those of Wilfred Owen or Robert Graves, two of the most popular poets of a war whose verse defined its cultural legacy. Death in their poems has none of the glimmer Seeger gives it. Owen describes “Knock-kneed” soldiers “coughing like hags” before a gas attack hits. “His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin . . ./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. 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.

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. Their depictions of life in the trenches match up with the images most commonly associated with World War I. It’s no coincidence: Their poems helped form that picture. 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. 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. Knowing what they knew, the literary crowd found Seeger’s poems antiquated, if not outright dishonest. They felt that readers should see the depth that European society had sunk to in World War I.

A poet whom many critics found unremarkable, whose efforts ended before his prime, who depicted a war that may not have ever existed in reality — is there any reason to remember his poems from among the tens of thousands written during the war? What is lost along with Seeger when he’s passed over?

It’s not that Seeger was an inadequate craftsman. What his poems lacked was by design. The vision of the war that Graves and Owen presented was secondary to Seeger. He saw what they saw, recognized it and looked elsewhere. He witnessed the truth of the war, sometimes before others who are remembered for their cold honesty. 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. To him, it was “the supreme experience,” a part of nature humans were destined to take part in.

The fact that Seeger had this romantic vision of war in 1914, and still held it in 1916, is what gives his work value. 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 strongest works against the war — Owen’s cutting verses, Siegfried Sassoon’s “Suicide in the Trenches,” Graves’s memoir, “Good-bye to All That” — were written after their authors had time to reflect on their experiences. They were written after Seeger had already been buried in the loam of northern France. Their critical devotees, who increased in number with the war’s 50th anniversary in the 1960s, had the benefit of even more hindsight: a second world war’s worth.

The Great War was as these poets described — trenches, gas, suicide, crippling shell shock. But it was also as the soldiers who volunteered to fight, even after the war had been dragging on for years, saw it: essential and just.

Seeger’s poems, with their innocence and their beatific tone, remind us “the war to end all wars” was a story of descent. It began with cavalry charges on horseback, with uniforms topped by plumed helmets, and parades through streets with flags waving and children tripping over themselves alongside soldiers — and it ended with parades of the blind and disfigured, with swaths of land so pocked with unexploded ordnance and so toxic with chemicals that they’re still uninhabited 100 years later. It’s difficult to reckon the distance of a drop just from where the falling object lands. Afterward, you might have a clearer eye when entering a new war, you might avoid phrases as giddily optimistic as “we’ll be home for Christmas,” but that hindsight view lacks something: the sense of gravity you catch from seeing a ball tip over the edge, pick up speed with a weightlessness that feels not so different from launching into the air, only to land in the mud without a bounce. Seeing that first moment at the rim of the fall is just as important for preventing the next war as seeing the mud that’s left at the end.

In the final stanza of his 1960 poem “MCMXIV,” the poet Philip Larkin closes with the line, “Never such innocence again.” It’s the rare poetic quotation popular enough that it has worked its way into the rhetorical life of countries that fought in World War I. It is used in newspaper headlines remembering the war and has been appropriated by other authors for their book titles. It’s a bitter fact of war that this innocence is often expressed by soldiers like Seeger who are then themselves lost. Seeger had no chance to become disillusioned by World War I. Or rather, he chose not to be. By the account of his fellow soldiers, Seeger continued singing a marching song as he lay wounded on the battlefield, other troops passing by him. He held fast to his image of the war. He died by the time medics came the following day. It was July 4, 1916, outside of Belloy-en-Santerre, a few days into the Battle of the Somme. In the four months that one battle lasted, there would be over a million casualties. The historian A.J.P. Taylor would later say, “Idealism perished on the Somme.” Maybe he’s right.