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QUIET
AMERICANS:
RESPONSES TO
WAR IN SOME
BRITISH AND
AMERICAN
POETRY OF THE
1960S
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Graham Greene’s novelThe Quiet American(1955) deals with the period shortly
after the Second World War when it became clear that imperial power was in
new hands. Set in Indochina at the beginning of the Vietnam War, it concerns the
decline and retreat of the old European colonial powers, Britain and France, and the
emergence of the United States as the major Western power. Greene realized that
this was to be a different kind of imperial power: a ‘quiet’ empire, as the novel has
it, too modest to call itself an empire at all. This empire would (in keeping with its
quietness) be fought for surreptitiously, by lending a hand to indigenous democratic