Rendezvous with Death—American Poems of the Great War

Military Review, March-April, 2004 by Jeffrey C. Alfier

RENDEZVOUS WITH DEATH--American Poems of the Great War, Mark W. Van Wienan, ed., University of Illinois Press, Champaign, 2002, 368 pages, $44.95.

   We owe the future
   the past, the long knowledge
   that is the potency of time to come.

These words from the poem At a Country Funeral, by Wendell Berry, are included in the wealth of obscure poetry that English professor Mark W. Van Wienan presents in the anthology Rendezvous With Death--American Poems of the Great War. This poem underscores an explicit U.S. response to "the push and pull of political commitments" of a society coming to grips with a war that irrevocably ended the last vestiges of international isolationism. In this anthology, Van Wienan expands on his earlier work, Partisans and Poets: The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War (Cambridge, New York, 1997).

Before America declared war against the Central Powers, it had inherited Britain's Kiplingesque belief that the Great War was being waged for the survival of the entire civilized world. Yet, many Americans were noninterventionists, or outright pacifists, believing that the country should not support the Allies until the rights of the oppressed at home were satisfied.

Whatever modern readers determined about the aesthetic and literary quality of these poems, a high percentage of them tethered debates surrounding U.S. intervention to women's suffrage, international socialism, civil rights, workers quality of life, the cause of world peace, and militarism. Therefore, this poetic outpouring must be seen in its cultural and social context, for how else can Americans today make sense of poems supporting such causes or calling for patriotic knitting, food conservation, or expressing simplistic "jingoism" and angry polemics?

Van Wienan reminds us that the poems of those war years were evaluated not for literary quality but for their partisanship. Still, today's readers will find many of them quite good, their subject matter transcending the age in which they were written--an age where newspapers, booklets, pamphlets, and journals became the exigent tools of a poetry that rose from all levels of society.

Some American female poets are not included in Van Wienan's anthology, but their exclusion might be because they were expatriates or were otherwise obscure. Nosheen Khan's, Woman's Poetry of the First World War (University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, 1998) includes many of those Van Wienan excluded.

The broad themes of the 150 poems of this anthology touch on issues still relevant today--institutionalized violence, political repression, militarism, and international relations. I agree with Van Wienan's assessment that the most important legacy of these poems is the war's dissident voices, since in them lies the true expression of American pluralism and democratic tolerance. This fact alone makes this book a valuable contribution to the study of wartime poetry.

MAJ Jeffrey C. Airier, USAF,

Ramstein Air Base, Germany