Finally Read the Second World War Aloud

I'd made a stack of books to read, and from which to read aloud, in anticipation of the 4th of July. The birthday of the Republic did not go quite as I'd planned.  No one at my house blew off a finger or anything like that; the potato-salad was delicious, ditto the ribs, and we were awake at midnight to see the fireworks.  My readings however did not go off in a timely way.

My old computer finally died.  My reliable old "flip" camera followed -- requiescat in pace -- not because it had stopped working but because it would not work with my new computer.  Meanwhile, I'd already recorded a dozen readings on the camera to post here.  Lost forever, though no great loss to posterity, I should think.  Took me ages to figure out how to use my new phone, edit the results on the new computer and post the results on Youtube and here.  Left me scrambling a bit, and just before I left on vacation to Pennsylvania for the 60th Anniversary of my parents.  So... that was some unfortunate timing.

Most of the poems I'd recorded were from Poets of World War II, an anthology from the Library of America's series, the American Poets Project.  It's a series I particularly like, though this was not a volume I'd had much use for when I bought it.  Edited by Harvey Shapiro, himself a good poet and veteran of that war, when I finally read the book it turned out to be full of interesting poems, most unknown to me, many by poets I already knew and liked. Stanley Kunitz, Louis Simpson, Anthony Hecht, were there, as were a number of less predictable writers like Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. (Though why Robert Lowell ((1917 - 1977)) should be unlikely I can't now say.  Perhaps I had some vague memory of him having gone to prison as a conscientious objector.)

Eventually, as should be evident to any regular visitor here, I figured out my technical difficulties, at least to the extent of having a few readings to post after all; late for the occasion, but something anyway to fill the space while I was gone. 

I can't say why I hadn't read Shapiro's anthology sooner. Perhaps having once read extensively in the more famous poetry of the First World War, I simply did not feel the same sense of obligation when it came to the poets of the Second.  I'd never thought much of the second group of poets as comprising a discreet group of writers or a distinct generation in quite the same sense as the first.  A shallow reading on my part, maybe plain stupid, but probably true.  Many of the most famous names from the First World War died in it; Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, or at least were defined by it, like Siegfried Sassoon.  Somehow, as a reader, the literature of the Second World War was all, or nearly all in prose for me; in the reporting of William L. Shirer and A. J. Leibling and the like, and in the novels of James Jones, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, and the rest of that most remarkable generation of writers in pursuit of the Great American Novel.

The best part of finally picking up Poets of World War II with the intention of reading something from it aloud was that, in the end, I read nearly all of it that way.  That's really the reason I pause just here to recommend the book.  Every schoolboy knows or used to know the most famous lines of WWI, from the poppies "between the crosses, row on row" In Flanders Fields, to "The old lie:" that ends Wilfred Owen's most famous poem, "Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori."  The poets of the Second World War I came to as still living, working poets, rather than the much anthologized dead of the First.  Anthony Hecht, Stanley Kunitz, Lincoln Kirstein, Louis Simpson, Edward Field, were all names I knew first in places like the New Yorker or in contemporary publications.  I did not know a line until I read it.  I knew these poets as grown men, in fact, men grown old as so perhaps they lacked the romantic tragedy of that earlier generation cut down in their first flower.

But when I finally, stupidly came to read them, and read them aloud from Shapiro's short anthology, I heard something of that same fierce confusion and disillusion, that sharp edge.  What could be more like the brisk acidity of Sassoon's best and bitterest lines than these, from Yvor Winters' To a Military Rifle (1942):

"The times come round again;
The private life is small"?

The revelation though was not in the familiarity of reading the next "war poets", but instead in the variety of voices in this next generation, and the ease of the forms loosened by modernism and all that came between the wars.  The long, flatly reportorial narratives of Edward Field's World War Two, or W. D. Snodgrass's Ten Days Leave, or Louis Simpson's A Bower of Roses, would never have occurred to the Georgians as poetry.  The quick, clipped fall of Richard Hugo's Where We Crashed -- most of the lines just single words tracing his descent -- were no more possible to those earlier poets than the bluntness of the curses that punctuate the crash.

And yet, and here's the bit I liked the best and the reason I wanted to read some of these aloud here, what I learned reading this little book, or rather what I was reminded of, was how musical these newer poems of a similar experience remained.  Aloud, these poems had all the power of those older, often more formal ones we read in school.  Good to hear.  Good to say.  If anything, I was envious of behalf of those poets who died in that first war of the century since so many of them were cheated of the chance to see all that they might have been free to write and say and think in the time that came after and in many ways from them.

So if anyone was wondering why, when I started reading aloud here again, I should choose to read so many of these particular poems, that's why.  It was new to me.  Hopefully, I managed to communicate something of my enthusiasm in the discovery, though I missed the occasion that prompted it.