532 The American Century: Literature since 1945Formalists and Confessionals
From the mythological eye to the lonely “I” in poetry
In the period immediately following World War II, American writers looked
back – in anger, in regret, in grief, in relief, or in one or more of many other series of
emotions – on a conflict that had threatened to engulf humankind. Among these
were the many poets who wrote of their own involvement in conflicts for which – as
one of them, Randall Jarrell, put it – “The soldier sells his family and his days.” “It is
I who have killed, / ” declared Karl Shapiro (1913–2000), “It is I whose enjoyment of
horror is fulfilled,” and, for a while, this sense of having participated in a great
historical crisis nurtured a poetry that was notable for its engagement, its direct
address to public issues and events. In 1945, for instance, two substantial collections
of war poems were published: The War Poets edited by the poet and influential
anthologist Oscar Williams (1900–1964) and War and the Poet edited by Richard
Eberhart. Not long after this, Louis Simpson (1923–), in poetry included in
The Arrivistes: Poems 1940–9 (1949), produced work that spoke sardonically of
“war-heroes,... wounded war-heroes,” “packaged and sent home in parts,” and that
tried, too, to capture the tension, the actual experience of war. Shapiro, for his part,
in early collections like Person, Place and Thing (1942), produced plangent memori-
als for the unknown soldier (“Elegy for a Dead Soldier”), bitter accounts of a war
machine in which “Trains lead to ships and ships to death or trains” (“Troop Train”),
and vivid descriptions of the life of an ordinary conscript during battles (“Full
Moon: New Guinea”) and on the return home (“Homecoming”). “Lord, I have seen
too much,” begins one of Shapiro’s poems; and that remark suggests the documen-
tary accuracy, tinged with a bitter knowingness, a sense of having seen what life is
really like at its worst, that characterizes many of these pieces.
But if documentary accuracy was the primary aim of most of these poets, this did
not necessarily preclude other ambitions. In particular, many writers were keen to
see the war in mythological terms. “Lord, I have seen too much,” for example, ends
with the poet-combatant comparing himself to Adam “driven from Eden to the East
to dwell”; and the legend of the Fall became a favorite way of adding a further
resonance to global conflict. This was especially true of Randall Jarrell (1914–1965),
whose volumes of poetry began with Blood for a Stranger (1942), and whose Complete
Poems was published in 1969. Innocence, and its loss, obsessed him; and the war
became for him a powerful symbol of loss, a reversal of the westward myth in that
his combatants invariably “fall to the East” (as Shapiro puts it), from innocence to
suffering and experience. This does not mean that his war poems are lacking in
documentary detail. On the contrary, they give a vivid, particularized portrait of
the life of pilots and gunners (“Eighth Air Force”), life aboard aircraft carriers
(“Pilots, Man Your Planes”), in prisoner-of-war camps (“Stalag Luft”), in barracks,
camp, and field (“Transient Barracks,” “A Lullaby,” “Mail Call”). What is remarkable,
however, is Jarrell’s capacity for capturing the dual nature of the experience of war.GGray_c05.indd 532ray_c 05 .indd 532 8 8/1/2011 7:31:29 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 29 PM