A History of American Literature

546 The American Century: Literature since 1945

and “minority” communities and cultures. There are many others. Two further

issues, in particular, have haunted postwar poets and in one case at least continue to

do so: the experience in Vietnam, which introduced America to defeat, and the

possible destruction of the world by nuclear war.

The war in Vietnam stimulated an enormous amount of poetry, much of it of

doubtful quality. A representative collection is Where is Vietnam? American Poets

Respond, which was published in 1967. For the most part, the poems published here

and elsewhere rely on simple invective (“All your strength, America, is in your

bombs!”) or on equally simple documentation:

On Thursday a Vietcong flag was noticed flying

Above the village of Man Quang in South Vietnam.

Therefore Skyraider fighter-bombers were sent in,

Destroying the village school and other “structures.”

With the first kind of poetry, anger tends to lose its edge in generalized, unfocused

condemnation (American poets have, on the whole, been unsuccessful with satire

and polemic). With the second, apart from the occasional gesture, little seems to be

added or gained by turning the experience into verse: in the passage just quoted, for

instance, except for the parody of the neutral dehumanized tone of war communiqués

(“structures”) and the ordering of the data within a fairly rudimentary rhythmic

pattern, the writer does nothing more than act the good journalist by handing us a

series of received facts. It is worth adding perhaps that the poem from which these

lines are taken, “School Day in Man Quang,” has a footnote: “This incident was

reported from Saigon ... by the Special Correspondent of the London Times.” This.

presumably, is meant to stress the factual nature of the piece. However, it also serves

to remind us that this poem, like the vast majority of those written about Vietnam,

is by a noncombatant. The best poems of World War II were produced by people like

Jarrell, Shapiro, and Simpson, who actually participated in it and, for the most part,

saw it as nasty, brutish, but necessary. By contrast, the best poems about Vietnam

have been by those who were not there but had an imaginative involvement in it, and

were committed to doing all they could to stop it. “All wars are useless to the dead,”

Adrienne Rich insisted. “Why are they dying?” Robert Bly asked. “I here declare the

end of the War,” announced Allen Ginsberg. Such pronouncements are typical.

American poets felt that they had to participate; they were gripped by what they read

about, what they saw on television, what they felt was happening in the streets

and to the youth of their country. They also had the firm conviction – as poems like

“The Asians Dying” by W. S. Merwin and “The Altar in the Street” by Denise Levertov

suggest – that the war could be ended with the help of the language of poetry.

There were two types of poetic language that were particularly successful, if not in

stopping the war, then at least in giving an adequate definition of its horror. The first

is illustrated by the Vietnam poems of Robert Bly, collected in such volumes as

The Light Around the Body and Counting Small-Boned Bodies (1979). Some of these

poems, like “The Teeth-Mother Naked at Last,” are jeremiads, fierce prophecies of

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