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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."
Dismantling Glory: Twentieth-Century Soldier Poetry
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American War Poetry: An Anthology
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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":
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