The Tears of War: Jarrell, Dickey, Hecht

Virgil's Aeneas, weeping over the frescoes that depict the fall of Troy, voices the tragic sense of life that animates these three war poets: "Tears are the nature of things [lacrimae rerum], hearts touched by human transience." In Not Without Glory, Vernon Scannell defines the themes of war poetry as "the proximity of danger and possible—even probable—death, the value of courage and the consolations of comradeship, the unifying power of shared ideals." The unbearable agony, cruelty, and death in war are redeemed, in a rapture of distress, by the poets' art.

This essay concentrates on the best work of American poets who wrote about World War II. Randall Jarrell (born 1914), James Dickey, and Anthony Hecht (both born a decade later in 1923) were in their 20s during the war. Jarrell had graduated from Vanderbilt; Dickey attended Clemson and Hecht studied at Bard before the war interrupted their education. Jarrell and Hecht were privates; Dickey a lieutenant. Jarrell was a noncombatant, stationed in America; Dickey fought an air war in the Pacific, Hecht was an infantryman in Europe. All three survived the war physically unscathed, and their experiences gave them material for a lifetime. World War II is usually considered a just war, fought to defeat the fascist aggressors, in which America became the savior of Europe and Asia. These poets see it differently. They value comradeship and mourn suffering and death, but their dominant theme is guilt, both German and American.

Jarrell felt humiliated by his poor performance in the army air force and regretfully wrote that during pilot training, "I was washed out (I got into a spin on a [test] ride and the chief pilot, as he said, decided I wasn't a safe flyer." He spent the war years from 1942 to 1946 on army bases in Texas, Illinois, and Arizona, and taught new pilots celestial navigation inside a plane model that simulated aeronautical conditions. Disillusioned by both his flight failure and inglorious stateside experience, he was also disgusted by the way the army functioned and bitterly lamented, with an element of self-pity: "I got sent to the army as a private. It is like being in an orphan asylum in a Dickens story, or in an old-fashioned inefficient jail. . . . I felt so strongly about everything I saw (the atmosphere was entirely one of lying, meaningless brutality and officiousness, stupidity not beyond belief but conception—the one word for everything in the army is petty)."

Hyperaware of his own safety, Jarrell is a man of feeling whose humanistic poems describe a range of suffering in distant places: the deaths of pilots flying from air bases and carriers, the victims in field hospitals, the agonies of children and the fate of Jews in extermination camps. In "Losses" he wrote about the deaths of both shot-down airmen and their distant victims after the bombing of German cities in the name of civilization. The war in the air is deadly and anonymous. In a modern version of Tacitus's observation on the nature of conquest—"they make a desert and call it peace"—Jarrell describes an ironic victory:

In bombers named for girls, we burnedThe cities we had learned about in school—Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay amongThe people we had killed and never seen.

In "The Angels at Hamburg" the bombs, retaliatory angels of death dropped by the Eighth Air Force in early May 1945 to end the war, are described apocalyptically in terms of the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. The angels proclaim

"There is no justice, man, but death." The victim mourns the destruction of his world:

In his heart Hamburg is no longer a city,There is no more state. . . .The air is smoke and the earth ashesWhere he was fire;He looks from his grave for life, and judgmentRides over his city like a star.

Jarrell refuses to accept, despite the horror of the extermination camps revealed at the end of the war, that all the guilt was on the German side...