“They Say the War Is Over”

In a time when the United States has been conducting at least two wars in the Middle East (one inarguably imperial, one ostensibly a response to 9/11); when the U.S. continues to operate hundreds of military bases across scores of countries and executes hundreds of targeted killings via remotecontrol “drones”; when thousands of returning soldiers and veterans carry the physical and psychic wounds of war; and when our defense budget occupies between 20 and 54 percent of the federal budget, Diederik Oostdijk’s Among the Nightmare Fighters: American Poets of World War II is a timely and all-too-rare exploration of war poetry by the best-known American poets who treat the Second World War.

Focusing primarily on the elite “soldier-poets” (Randall Jarrell, James Dickey, Karl Shapiro, Anthony Hecht, John Ciardi, Lincoln Kirstein, and Howard Nemerov) and two conscientious-objector poets (Robert Lowell and William Stafford), Oostdijk plumbs the archive to consider the role of the war in the work of the poets and the work of these poets in our understanding of a war that Studs Terkel sardonically termed the “Good War.” The importance and value of Oostdijk’s archival research is made clear from the book’s opening, which reveals an unpublished poem (“D Day plus 20 years”) by Howard Nemerov as what Oostdijk calls “the quintessence of the poetic response to World War II” (2)—an arguably major poem that Nemerov never saw fit to publish. The poem’s focus on silence and an almost fatalistic resignation are hallmarks of the poetic response of the poets of the Second World War; the fact that it was never published doubled this felt silencing—both by the culture and by the poets themselves.

In this regard, Oostdijk’s choice of title is particularly resonant. Taken from Randall Jarrell’s canonical poem “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”—perhaps the most well-known of all American poems of the Second World War—“the nightmare fighters” denotes the airman’s experience of the enemy fire (from both the ground and the air) that he wakens to, in the waking dream of warfare. Figuratively, the “nightmare fighters” alludes to the long-standing emotional effects of the war for the survivors of the conflict. For Americans during the Second World War, of course, these survivors were soldiers, since the U.S. was almost entirely spared the horrors of battle on home soil. This is precisely why we need to listen to the voices of soldiers, not merely to understand what battle feels like but to hear how the war—for its prosecutors and its victims—persists in bodies and minds and does not end neatly with peace treaties.

Among the Nightmare Fighters builds upon the crucial scholarship of Paul Fussell (The Great War and Modern Memory) and Lorrie Goldensohn (Dismantling Glory), among others, to stake a claim for the importance of this corpus of war poetry and the poets who emerged from the war’s crucible. Divided into four parts—“Haunting Traditions,” “Emerging Selves,” “Confused Masculinities,” and “Troubled Afterlives”—the book focuses as much on personalities and biography as it does on poems. While it is indeed true that these poets wrestled with the dominant poetic tradition and strictures of identity, and continued to wrestle with the war, could this not be said about any generation or cohort of poets? One weakness of Among the Nightmare Fighters is Oostdijk’s inability to make a good argument for choosing an almost entirely white, middle-class, canonically elite set of male poets to examine. Though he acknowledges this focus early on, he does not argue convincingly about the necessity of the exclusions that such a focus entails; in his words, the elision of great poets such as Muriel Rukeyser, George Oppen, and Gwendolyn Brooks is due to the fact that “it appears that their influences or experiences were markedly different from the group of poets featured in this book” (5). It is...