Rendezvous with Death: American Poems of the Great War (review)

This superb anthology continues Mark Van Wienen's painstaking recuperation of American poetry of the first World War, begun in the 1997 study Partisans and Poets (Cambridge University Press). The book recovers many verses that deserve to be known, but even more importantly, it offers a valuable case study of the relations between poetry and the social world. Van Wienen's introduction, written with subtlety and passion, draws upon the canon-challenging arguments of Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Jane Tompkins, and Cary Nelson to propose that "modern American poetry" was not the private preserve of a few great stylists, but a free-for-all of writing that took place in many styles and on many sites. The relation of aesthetics to politics is especially urgent in these wartime verses, which the editor strikingly describes as "weapons," "tools of war that might bring U.S. citizens to kill their German counterparts; that might prevent such killing; that might protect the lives of U.S. citizens, their well-being, their rights; or that might conspire to take them away" (1). Van Wienen's poets, whatever their political position, sought not "the achievement of timelessness" but "the impact of timeliness" (6). Even as he disagrees with many of their ethical judgments, the editor admires their openness to political commitment. The result is a compelling account of twentieth-century American poetry in which the high-modernist posture of disengagement from the social world is almost completely absent.

Unlike Paul Fussell, Jon Stallworthy, and others who focus almost exclusively on the verse of (British) soldiers in combat, Van Wienen offers a canon of "war poems" that includes a vast range of social actors, political positions, and approaches to writing verse. He cheerfully juxtaposes hastily-composed occasional newspaper pieces of all political stripes with magnificently wrought "literary" responses to the war such as Robert Frost's "Not to Keep" and Amy Lowell's "Orange of Midsummer"—and with the powerfully satirical broadsides of the IWW, the National Woman's Party, and other radical organizations. Some of these had notably wide readership at the time, but must now be unearthed from deep within archival collections. Van Wienen has strong affection for these blasts from the left, particularly their parodic use of high-toned Wilsonian rhetoric to critique the power relations of a nation striving for global moral authority while callously oppressing women, immigrants, nonwhite natives, and working people within its own borders. In an ideal world of Great War poetry anthologies, I might wish to see a few more ambitious works by better-known modern poets—and yet, because most of their work is readily available and this radical verse so scattered and inaccessible, I can't quarrel with Van Wienen's decision to emphasize it.

The thoroughgoing historicism of the anthology's organization is refreshing in a genre that largely discourages such specificity. Following the introduction, verse selections are arranged within seven chronological slices, beginning with a very brief group of "Presentiments," followed by "August to December 1914," then by yearly groupings through 1918, and ending with a section of "Repercussions." I don't miss the nebulous "thematic" groupings of other anthologies (though there is a detailed "Index of Topics" that allows readers easily to find poems referring, for example, to Woodrow Wilson, Russia, or women). Each of the sections begins with a crisply-written and substantive discussion of that year's verse as it was shaped by, and occasionally shaped, events of the wartime world; and then presents poems in the order in which they were published, month by month. One might worry that such a firmly chronological arrangement would be limiting, but instead it generates a vivid and immediate chronicle of events as they happen, and gives a coherent shape to the welter of American verse responding to the war. In the second half...