The cadets want to get as much information as they can. They grab people who come back and ask them a lot of questions: 'What is it like to lead in combat? What is combat like? What are the techniques that I can learn here that I can apply when I get into those kinds of circumstances?' Soldiers always want to know what combat is like. And poetry provides us a great vehicle to teach the cadets as much as anyone can what that combat is like."

So speaks General William Lennox in his interview for the recent documentary film Voices in Wartime (at www.voicesinwartime.org). General Lennox is Superintendent of West Point Military Academy; with a doctorate in literature and a dissertation on American war poetry, he teaches a course on war poetry at West Point. The "information" that he finds poetry uniquely offering to cadets is basically experiential. "For those who are in combat, it's very hard for them to articulate what they experience. They go through a whole series of emotions: joy, elation, horror, fear. What genre allows you to portray that better than poetry? I don't know. I think poetry can capture all of those emotions at one point at one time and transfer them. That's why I think poetry is so important."

I expect that General Lennox will find Lorrie Goldensohn's new anthology, American War Poetry, invaluable for his students. Following America's wars chronologically, the volume includes poems from all our wars starting with colonial times and ending with a contemporary section called "El Salvador, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and the Persian Gulf." A separate section covers "The Indian Wars, 1620-1911." So the reader looking for a taste of military experience will find, for instance, Randall Jarrell's "Losses," which General Lennox in fact quotes in his interview for its expression of war's dehumanizing impact on soldiers:

We read our mail and counted up our missions—
In bombers named for girls, we burned
The cities we had learned about in school—
Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among
The people we had killed and never seen.

Or Bruce Weigl's "The Last Lie," with its chilling evocation of soldiers' crazed cruelty toward native children in Vietnam:

Some guy in the miserable convoy
Raised up in the back of our open truck
And threw a can of c-rations at a child
Who called into the rumble for food.
He didn't toss the can, he wound up and hung it
On the child's forehead

And seeing her bleeding head, the soldier is revved up for a replay. He horribly "laughed"—

And fingered the edge of another can
Like it was the seam of a baseball
Until his rage ripped
Again into the faces of children
Who called to us for food.

But readers of American War Poetry will find much more than what Goldensohn calls "soldier poetry." That was the explicit subject of Dismantling Glory, her 2003 scholarly study just reissued in paperback, subtitled Twentieth-Century Soldier Poetry (a slightly inaccurate subtitle, as the book deals with only British and U.S. poets). Goldensohn's focus there was soldiers' own war experience as expressed in their poetry. In the anthology, Goldensohn broadens her range. "War poetry" includes "soldier poetry," of course, but it also includes the voices of civilians at home, who experience war in a way very different from the warriors. We hear, for instance, Emily Dickinson honoring the fallen Civil War soldiers as "Saviours— / Present Divinity." We get Amy Lowell's masterpiece of controlled anguish at a soldier-fiancé's battlefield death in "Patterns." We find Gwendolyn Brooks taking on the persona of a black World War II soldier in "Negro Hero":

Am I clean enough to kill for them,
do they wish me to kill
For them or is my place while death licks his lips
and strides to them
In the galley still?

And Goldensohn made the brilliant decision to broaden—or maybe "lengthen" is the appropriate image—the notion of "war poetry" even further by including subsequent poetic reflections on a particular war. So, for instance, the section on the Alamo includes the refreshing perspective of contemporary Hispanic American poet Martín Espada's "The Other Alamo"; the Civil War section extends to an excerpt from contemporary ex-Marine Andrew Hudgins' After the Lost War, his powerful re-imagining of Confederate soldier-poet Sidney Lanier's life; and the section on the Indian Wars stretches to include work by contemporary Native American poets like Joy Harjo and Louise Erdrich.

The introductions to each section of the anthology are a model of concise, accessible contextualizing. For each war's poetry, Goldensohn offers historical and literary context. She is also interested in following certain threads through the centuries of our war poetry: how flag and country strive to be reaffirmed with each successive war; how poetry honoring war's leaders seems to cease after the Civil War; how the poetry seesaws between the conventionally formal and the experimentally vernacular until the Vietnam War, when a stylistic explosion breaks open forms and welcomes a wild array of ultra-vernacular first-person self-examining verse.

War itself, as a mode of national behavior, has become increasingly controversial in the past nearly hundred years. Goldensohn makes clear, especially in Dismantling Glory, that her own stance is firmly against militarism and war's brutally destructive waste. But to her credit she doesn't let her personal abhorrence of war slant her selection of poems. So we get the rousing cheer for "heroes' blood" in Oliver Wendell Holmes' "Old Ironsides" along with E.E. Cummings' "i sing of Olaf"—"whose warmest heart recoiled at war: / a conscientious object-or." And in Dismantling Glory, one of her main themes is a persistent contradiction in soldier poems that fascinates her: how these poems tend simultaneously toward revulsion against war yet also celebration of it as a testing ground for masculinity.

Dismantling Glory has other running motifs as well, tracked through soldier poets from World War I through World War II and the Vietnam War: adaptation of the lyric as war poetry's genre; the complex gendering of male soldier poetry; changing perceptions of the soldier as victim (World War I) to the soldier as killer (World War II) to soldier as both perpetrator of atrocities and victim of industrial war's technology (Vietnam); increasing sensitivity to the civilians whose homeland is the battleground. Except for the opening overview chapter and the final chapter treating a range of American poets of the Vietnam War, Goldensohn's method is to construct her book around representative poets for each period. The method works best for the chapter on Wilfred Owen, who really was transformative in crafting a new war lyric of witness to soldiers' suffering. Goldensohn helpfully contextualizes Owen's achievement with poetry from his colleague Siegfried Sassoon as well as prose about the Great War from contemporaries and subsequent historians. The next chapter focuses on Auden because, Goldensohn argues persuasively, though not a soldier himself he produced a poetry of ironic distance which definitively influenced the soldier poets of World War II. The chapter's purpose is to explore the intriguing question of why no major poet of World War II emerged. Goldensohn deftly fields the various possible reasons: a feeling of belatedness, as if Owen and his contemporaries had already "done" the battlefield experience; Auden's astringencies about avoiding pathos; a numbness at having to follow not only Auden but the giants Yeats and Eliot and Pound.

The two chapters on World War II poets themselves—the Englishman Keith Douglas and the American Randall Jarrell—are full of rich insights into these particular poets but less successful in giving a sense of their representativeness. Goldensohn's contextualization narrows to these two men's personal psychologies rather than stretching out much into the poetry of their compatriots. Some engagement with the poems of, say, Karl Shapiro and Richard Eberhart and James Dickey (all included in American War Poetry) would have made these chapters feel less claustrophobic.

My only other frustration with Dismantling Glory as a whole is with the writing. Though only occasionally does academic jargon clog the prose, sentences have a tendency to get confusingly convoluted. More distracting still, the structure and line of argument within chapters are often difficult to discern. None of this should deter fellow scholars, however, from finding in Dismantling Glory a wealth of useful information and fresh insight into the nature of war poetry and indeed of war itself.

This is to say that the audience of Dismantling Glory is clearly scholars of war poetry — like General Lennox. The audience for the anthology, American War Poetry, is a more open question. Who, besides General Lennox's cadets, will benefit from its comprehensive sweep of our nation's poetic responses to war? I suggest that every thinking person in our war-beset country can benefit, and immensely. As Goldensohn notes, since the Korean War we have been a country perpetually in a state of war. But where is the national discussion on this feature of our national identity? I agree with General Lennox that poetry can uniquely open readers to the multidimensionality of experience. In an article he wrote for Poetry (April 2005), Lennox talks about why poetry is core to the West Point curriculum: "Poetry confronts cadets with new ideas that challenge their worldview&ellip; . In teaching cadets poetry, we teach them not what to think, but how to think. Finally, poetry gives our cadets a new and vital way to see the world, a world that many of my generation could not have imagined." Why limit this mind-expanding opportunity to cadets? Let's put American War Poetry in the curriculum of all colleges and on the reading lists of book clubs, churches, and civic groups across the country.

Peggy Rosenthal is an independent scholar specializing in poetry's engagement with spirituality and with issues of war and peace. Her most recent books are Imagine a World: Poetry for Peacemakers (Pax Christi USA) and an edition of Denise Levertov's poetry, Making Peace (New Directions).

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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