(N.B. this is a draft fragment from a much longer essay in progress about George Oppen's war poetry. Some of this was written in China for a keynote address to a conference on
“Language, Culture, and the Military” at Changsha’s National Defense University of Technology. The talk was titled “How to Write a War Poem: George Oppen’s Broken Language.” Jan. 4, 2019. Except for a scholar from Hong Kong who called herself Smile, mine was the only the talk delivered in English. A tall, dashing Pakistani officer joked to me afterwards, “you’re a *real* scholar." His own talk had been about strengthening ties between Pakistan and China, given in English and flawless Mandarin. We bonded over a common love of LeBron James -- basketball, a language more universal than poetry).
Among American poets who fought in Europe during World War II, three carry the unusual distinction of having fought in the Battle of the Bulge, then gone on to win the Pulitzer Prize: Richard Wilbur, Louis Simpson, and George Oppen. Their reports on their experiences in that theater of war vary considerably in both tone and depth. Unlike Wilbur and Simpson, whose first books contain war poems, Oppen didn’t write about his wartime experience until rather late, when he was in his early 50s. Poems like “Blood from a Stone,” and “Survival: Infantry” (from 1961’s The Materials) weren’t delayed, as it were, because of some larger strategy on the poet’s part. Rather, the severe trauma Oppen suffered necessitated a longer gestation period. As a result, the war poems he began writing in the 1960s achieve a haunting, introspective quality that are lacking in Wilbur and Simpson. Oppen’s circumstances – deep wounds from mortar fire, later persecution by the FBI – allowed him, if that’s the right word, to more thoroughly metabolize his experience.
(N.B.: Wilbur won the first of two Pulitzers in 1957 for Things of This World; Simpson, in 1964, for At The End of the Open Road; and Oppen, for Of Being Numerous, in 1969).
As Anthony Beevors relates it in Ardennes 1944, Louis Simpson, “came across a Sherman tank, with a sergeant from the 10th Armored Division ‘seated negligently in the turret, as if on the saddle of a horse.’ Fifty metres down the road a panzer burned. He asked the sergeant what had happened. ‘They tried to get through,’ the sergeant replied in a bored voice and turned away … ‘I saw Tolstoy’s sergeant at Borodino, with his pipe stuck in his mouth, directing the fire of his battery. On men like this the hinge of battle swung. They did not see themselves in a dramatic role. They would do great tasks, and be abused for not doing them right, and accept this as normal’” (A 209-10). This, of course, is the essence of the Tolstoyan view of history: that random actions by anonymous individuals and odd chances shape the outcome of large historical events rather than the grand designs of Napoleons.
Simpson’s war poems like “Carentan” and “I Dreamed That in a City Dark as Paris” carry a poignant melancholy but they’re finally, for all their sincerity, too placid, too Wordsworthian, to adequately convey their speaker’s actual experience. Indeed, the weaknesses of Simpson’s war poems have only been magnified by the passage of time. They serve to underscore the long-running argument about traditional and radical conceptions of form that’s shaped so much of the anthology wars: is form a matter of adhering to regular meter and rhyme, or does it follow content, as Olson and Creeley urged, creating self-sustaining patterns based on breath and perception? Simpson’s war poems act as containers of experience. Indeed, he describes how “Carentan’s” ballad-like structure enabled him to get a purchase on the trauma of the war, which had left him in a semi-amnesiac state. “Carentan” is a personal favorite of mine. It’s a poem that continues to grow on me, even as its shortcomings become more pronounced over time. To find it wanting by comparing it to Oppen’s war poetry is crass. But its emotive power feels remote, encased under glass.
By contrast, Oppen’s poems – with their internal fissures, their half-exploded stanzaic patterns and jagged, shrapnel-like enjambments – are centrigual rather centripetal. They do not seek, in Beckett’s words, to contain the chaos of postwar reality but to let it in. Not as an orderly and formal report on experience, but as the written trace of trauma.
No man
But the fragments of metal
Tho there men there were men Fought
No man but the fragments of metal
Burying my dogtag with H
For Hebrew in the rubble of Alsace (NCP 218).
According to Robert McDowell, writing of his Collected in a1989 issue of The Hudson Review, Robert Bly and others criticized Simpson’s earnest traditionalism, faulting it for its failure to adequately express “grim modern realities.” McDowell, nothing if not lavish in his fulsome praise, goes on to declare At The End of the Open Road “the poetry volume of the sixties” – a judgment that sounds risible now (The Hudson Review
42.1 158-164). Of course, nothing is easier to mock then the smugness of older critics’ notions of posterity. But in a decade which ratified the emergence of Creeley, Levertov, Baraka, and Ashbery the idea that this book defined the decade is absurd. That said, At The End of the Open Road probably stands as Simpson’s most singular achievement and still rewards attention, especially the title poem, notable for its elegant, understated and ironic juxtaposition of utopianism and muted, postwar despair.
Simpson served with a glider-infantry regiment of the 101st Airborne Division in France, Holland, Belgium, and Germany. In combat he was a runner; carrying messages – a not unhazardous undertaking. In Holland he was wounded by a shell, and at Bastogne his feet were frost-bitten; but he survived. After the War, however, he had a nervous breakdown and was taken into hospital suffering from amnesia. The War was blacked out in his mind, as were episodes in his life before the War. When he was discharged from hospital, he found that he could hardly read or write. In a contributor's note to an anthology, Simpson says:
“Before the war I had written a few poems and some prose. Now I found that poetry was the only kind of writing in which I could express my thoughts. Through poems, I could release the irrational, grotesque images I had accumulated during the war; and imposing order on those images enabled me to recover my identity. In 1948, when I was living in Paris, one night I dreamed that I was lying on the bank of a canal, under machine-gun and mortar fire. The next morning I wrote it out in the poem 'Carentan O Carentan', and as I wrote I realized that it wasn't a dream, but the memory of my first time under fire.”
(qtd. in Jon Stallworthy, "The Fury and the Mire," The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry, ed. Tim Kendall (Oxford: OUP, 2007): 566–67.
Perhaps Simpson’s most evocative poem of the war is “I Dreamt in a City Dark as Paris,” from 1959’s A Dream of Governors. The instant irony of the title, for Paris is commonly known as the City of Light, takes us into its melancholy, rueful dreamscape at once, in the which the speaker imagines himself addressing a soldier much himself like from 1914.
The helmet with its vestige of a crest,
The rifle in my hands, long out of date,
The belt I wore, the trailing overcoat
And hobnail boots, were those of a poilu.
I was the man, as awkward as a bear (DG 83).
As Hank Lazer remarks, in looking back from the 1940s and Simpson’s own bitter experience, the poem offers a lament for the futility of both conflicts, indeed, of all wars. (On Louis Simpson: Depths Beyond Happiness, UP of Mich, 187). Janis Stout draws a similar conclusion, noting that “the two soldiers’ experiences have an essential sameness” (159) (Coming Out of War: Poetry, Grieving, and the Culture of the World Wars, Alabama UP 2016). Indeed, the poem positions Paris at a grave intersection of the diachronic and the synchronic, where a certain historical fatalism and cultural instinct for self-destruction keep reenacting themselves.
Simpson’s World War II poems record the personal but gesture at the universal. Oppen’s poems, written at a much later date, steer away from any larger statements about the war – except of course “the we” of “of being numerous.” His experience taught him to be wary of such generalizations. Such declarations, such claims to totality, had been knocked clean out of him.
On the other hand, Wilbur’s expertly crafted poems about his experience in Alsace have a remote, detached flavor to them. They read like someone on holiday, as though the poet were only a tourist, a voyeur at the Battle of the Bulge. Let me blunt: as war poetry they are embarrassments. The real war seems to have occurred outside the compass of his experience or his ability to convey it. They have a polite distant feel to them, as if conveying trauma would be an act of bad manners. Wilbur’s experience is suffocated by the straight-jacket of his technique.
According to Robert Bagg, Wilbur served as a radio operator behind the lines with the second detachment of the 36th Texas Division Message Center. As Bagg notes: “Explosions that failed to kill anyone appear as momentary inconveniences” (THR 440). It’s not clear how much actual front line combat he saw. Bagg states that his unit came under heavy fire as they advanced through the Midi. Yet Wilbur’s posting allowed him plentiful leisure time in which he could write poems and letters home to his parents. Wilbur’s perhaps best-known war poem, “First Snow in Alsace,” sounds a rather off-key note of the pastoral that verges on the soporific. To judge from its calmly measured tone, one would never know he was in the biggest battle of the European Theater. Although the snow covers ammo dumps and the bombed-out roofs of homes, its benign presence altering the landscape by temporary erasure, Wilbur’s effort to evoke the miraculous in the midst of ruin borders on the banal:
Persons and persons in disguise,
Walking the new air white and fine,
Trade glances quick with shared surprise.
At children's windows, heaped, benign,
As always, winter shines the most,
And frost makes marvelous designs (PRW 182).
If this is irony, it’s rather filigreed. Harvey Shapiro, in his introduction to the LOA anthology “Poets of the Second World War,” notes that Wilbur, along with fellow combatant Anthony Hecht, have been criticized for a certain “decorative formalism,” but he hedges it with an ambivalent “wrongly, I think.” I have no such qualms. In the midst of war’s horror, Wilbur’s poem seems leeched of life, bloodless, a mere formal exercise in the nicety of perception that defined the ideal of the well-made poem in the 1940s. Its lulling tone-deaf rhyme schemes give it a precious, hand-embroidered feel, as when the poet observes in “Mined Country,” that “cows mid-munch go splattered over the sky.” The frivolous tone of the poem is not, as one might expect, imposing some kind of ironic distance on scenes where cows suffer grotesque dismemberment.
By contrast, Louis Simpson’s famous poem “Carentan,” sounds a classic ballad-like dirge about the fierce fighting to take that key French village as part of the D-Day invasion. Simpson’s simple four-beat measure echoes the stark cadences of “The Battle of Harlaw.”
The Hielanmen, wi their lang swords,
They laid on us fu sair,
An they drave back our merry men
Three acres breadth an mair.
And here's Simpson:
Lieutenant, what’s my duty,
My place in the platoon?
He too’s a sleeping beauty,
Charmed by that strange tune.
Carentan O Carentan
Before we met with you
We never yet had lost a man
Or known what death could do
Simpson, who as a member of the legendary parachute division, the 101st Screaming Eagles, took part in the bitter D-Day fighting in Carentan (as memorably dramatized in the HBO series “Bands of Brothers,” though he was not part of Easy Company). He conveyed his experience of combat by relying on the traditional meters and protocols of the ballad, which gave him a form with which he could transmit something urgent yet contained.
Unlike Simpson’s elegant constructions and Wilbur’s rather glib poeticized gems about his experiences in Alsace, Oppen’s poems about the war are not neatly packaged nuggets loaded with dull ironies. They are haunted, shot full of holes, figuratively and literally: the broken syntax enacts the trauma of war and specifically of his being wounded by mortar shrapnel. The broken syntax signifies “the strange ego” that replaces “the simple ego” of lyric untouched by war.
Oppen’s approach joined his commitment to an impersonal modernist aesthetics consistent with the principles of the Objectivists to the experience of the war. In Samuel Beckett’s trenchant phrase, he sought for a form that could “admit the chaos and … not try to say that the chaos is really something else … form that could accommodate the mess.” As Oppen himself put it in his poem, “Blood from a Stone”: “There is a simple ego in lyric,/A strange one in war.” The lines indicate a fracturing of consciousness – a vivid before and after portrait. One becomes estranged from oneself and the simple purchase one had on one’s pre-war mind is pulverized by the brutality of combat.
Oppen’s wartime experience – along with his disillusionment with modernism itself, especially that espoused by his former mentor, Ezra Pound, led to his deep distrust of language. As he writes in, “A Language of New York”: “Possible/to use/ words provided one treat them/as enemies./Not enemies—Ghosts/Which have run mad/In the subways” (NCP 116). But who are these ghosts that haunt the poet? They represent the failure of language itself -- of the inability of words to adequately express the most basic experience, which the war has destroyed.
