[New-Poetry] Where are the war poets?

[Rsgwynn1 at cs.com]

Ah, I see that Turner is mentioned.  Good book.

Don't know why he mentioned Thomas, who wrote some poems before going to 
France but none while there.

http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/thomas2.html

He should have mentioned Graves and Blunden, among others, though Graves's 
war poems (like "The Persian Version") are masterpieces of indirection.  Despite 
the claims that are made for Rosenberg, I still think Sasson and Owen 
superior.  Rosenberg is good, but I still get a sort of "business as usual" feeling 
from his war poems.  Maybe by the time he wrote, the war had settled into what 
appeared to be a permanent condition.  With Sassoon and Owen, there's still 
that great sense of moral outrage.

One of the very interesting ones was the American John Allen Wyeth, though 
there's considerable confusion about his biography.  Apparently the Wyeth who 
wrote the poems was the son of the Civil War soldier-doctor.  Here is an 
interesting website on all (or mostly all) of the WWI writers:

http://www.lit.kobe-u.ac.jp/~hishika/otherpoet.htm

For my money, the best Vietnam poems were written by non-combatants (or 
non-combat soldiers), Komunyakaa and Balaban.  And who is the most recognized 
American poet of WWII?  Jarrell.  Who never left the states.

When you get right down to it, most wars since the Trojan have inspired a 
fairly skimpy amount of good poems, with the exception of WWI, which was a type 
of war that reversed almost all of the traditional concepts of war as a 
glorious activity.

And don't forget Stephen Crane.  "Do Not Weep, Maiden, War Is Kind" is a 
great one, as are Whitman's (largely reportorial) war poems.  Cummings also has 
some good takes, though from his usual off-center perspective. This 
falling-short may have something to do with aesthetic distance in the face of such horror; 
that the British poets were able to do so well with the subject matter may 
have something to do with their having been brought up with all the conventional 
ideas of "sacrifice" and "nobility" for the Empire.  This gave them a natural 
sounding board for their contrary responses.

Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory is surely relevant in this regard.

If a poet wants to get across the reality of a contemporary war (as Turner 
does) there is the huge stumbling block of instantaneous media coverage.  Still, 
this doesn't explain the absence of Korean War poetry, which certainly 
provided enough amazing imagery (those shit-fertilized rice fields) to inspire my 
junior high school teachers (who were of that generation) but not the poets.

I find the subject of war poetry consistenly fascinating, mainly because (in 
Graves's terms) there was so much "Repression of War Experience."  I think 
that a lot of it had (and has) to do with the inability of poets to find an 
appropriate idiom to express what they have seen.  Turner does a good job, in a 
flat, objective, WCWilliams sort of way.   
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