1/31/2024 0 Comments War poetWhen Alexander of Macedon went out to wage his campaign of world conquest, he nightly tucked a dagger under his pillow, and waking or sleeping, also carried a headful of passages from Homer’s Iliad. This recognition came quickly to some and haltingly to others, but it always came with pain and the conviction that there is no return to innocence.”įrom the outset, the compelling poems by combat veterans of this war were against its glorification, and in profound rejection of claims to ennobling, mythic, or heroic properties. What distinguishes the voices in this volume is their progression toward an active identification of themselves as agents of pain and war-as “agent-victims” of their own atrocities. This passage from the introduction to the anthology, Winning Hearts and Minds: War Poems by Vietnam Veterans, was signed off on by Larry Rottmann, Jan Barry, and Basil Pacquet: “Previous war poets have traditionally placed the blame for the horrors of war directly on others. For many of these poets-not just those I cite-there was a raw and burning guilt over wartime personal and group misconduct that represents a broadening of subject and an ethical leap.Ī significant gathering of poems appeared in 1972, collected by members of the protest group, Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Nor is this war poetry, in its irony and skepticism, and in the lengthening retrospect which time affords us, any less rewarding than writing from other wars in its aesthetic content. Its largely first-person perspective sits easily within the candidly permissive world of autobiographical reference, from which issues a great directness and urgency of feeling. It is a less cagey verbal instrument than that wielded by forebears in the genre, but one no less eloquent, often no less lyrical, and certainly no less impassioned. Vietnam War poetry is usually blunt and prosaic-its language indebted to popular culture, cinematic montage, and a modernist wrenching of time and space. The war poetry of Vietnam veterans generally favors vernacular, a frequent use of acronym, and short, stabbing cadence in place of traditional English meters. This move was new, and not duplicated by other generations of war poets. I will be looking at Vietnam War poetry both before and after 2003, narrowing my focus to a small group of poets whose war experience, full of guilt and regret, led them to a post-war body of work expressing an extraordinary subsequent interest in the country of their former enemy, and in its art, culture, and people. I also include the category-defying poetry of John Balaban-a conscientious objector who went straight to the heart of conflict for a term of engagement equal in exposure and intensity to that of the other poets I discuss. Ehrhart, Yusef Komunyakaa, Bruce Weigl, and others, choosing to look more at those with recognizable literary merit and at those for whom the flow of poetry did not dry up after one or two books. Because the poems are their own best witness, I quote freely from combat veterans Doug Anderson, W.D. This piece considers the fact that American soldier poetry was not merely dedicated to battle and battlefield fraternity, but was emblematic of a frequently ambivalent engagement with the enemy and with the Vietnamese civilian population. Among the two million and more young men who went to Vietnam as soldiers, those dozens who came home to write about the Vietnam War evolved a poetry which deserves to be better known-allied to, but distinctively different from other anti-war poetry of the time.
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