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  • Poetry and the War(s)
  • Michael S. Begnal (bio)
American Poetry and the First World War, Tim Dayton. Cambridge University Press, 2018.
News of War: Civilian Poetry 1936–1945, Rachel Galvin. Oxford University Press, 2018.
A Shadow on Our Hearts: Soldier-Poetry, Morality, and the American War in Vietnam, Adam Gilbert. University of Massachusetts Press, 2018.

A recent essay by poet laureate Tracy K. Smith contends that, through the 1990s, American poetry was gripped by a "firm admonition to avoid composing political poems," but with the shock of 9/11 and the ensuing war in Iraq, "something shifted in the nation's psyche" that sparked a renewed flowering of socially engaged political poetry. Three new critical monographs remind us, however, that, at least when it comes to war, poets have always been political. In their respective volumes, Tim Dayton, Rachel Galvin, and Adam Gilbert are concerned with the ways in which poets respond not only to war itself but also the ideology and propaganda that supports it, how their work resists or sometimes replicates these scripts, and the strategies they use to construct the poetic authority to address it. Just as Smith suggests that contemporary political poetry can be "a means of owning up to the complexity of our problems, of accepting the likelihood that even we the righteous might be implicated by or complicit in some facet of the very wrongs we decry," so do these critical texts, read together, reveal that resistance to hegemonic narratives is more complicated than simply writing an antiwar poem, that subverting the narratives of war requires some knowledge of how their sociopolitical and economic algorithms (so to speak) function to begin with.

Dayton's American Poetry and the First World War (2018) is unique among the works considered here in that it looks at that war and the poetry it inspired through a Marxist-materialist lens. This confers a number of advantages, one being that it provides a model for contrasting the real reasons behind the US' entry into the war with the jingoistic discourses perpetuated in its favor that the poets whom Dayton examines (mostly) amplified. Much has been written about the disillusionment that the war engendered among high modernists like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, among others, and Paul Fussell's argument in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975)—that World War I introduces ironic disjuncture as the [End Page 540] primary trope of literary modernism—still looms large (Fussell 38). Dayton's aim is to examine how the poets often served Woodrow Wilson's "audacious attempt to establish the United States as the hegemonic power of the capitalist world system" (15). Dayton's clarity about the wider purpose of the war, "a contest over which nation would succeed the United Kingdom as the hegemonic capitalist power, the US or Germany," needs to be made prominent because so much of the rhetoric, both in the popular press and in the poetry he studies here, helped to obscure the underlying economic reasons for the war, instead invoking an anachronistic millennialism or the ideology of a medievalist crusader (67).

Dayton spends much of his first chapter putting distance between his historical-materialist approach (his theoretical foundation is Marx's base/superstructure model, as modified by Sean Creaven to include a third level, the substructure) and that of scholars like Mark Van Wienen, Cary Nelson, Walter Kalaidjian, and others, who have in recent decades championed the work of political poets formerly excluded from the modernist canon. Dayton terms these critics "left neo-pragmatists" and points out that "none of them operate from within a classical Marxist framework, despite their leftist commitment" (29). Though he presumably shares this political commitment, Dayton is particularly trenchant about Van Wienen's Partisans and Poets: The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War (1997). While acknowledging its value as a recovery project, Dayton criticizes this 20-year-old text for being content to do "cultural work," which, he asserts, "threatens to devolve into a gross instrumentalism if it becomes a total program, rather than a way of understanding an aspect of literary (or other) works" and which, being itself "a hallmark of capitalist modernity, is...

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