Margaret A. May
ENGL 532
Dr. A. Vander Zee
09 December 2024
Anti-War Poetry in the Aftermath of Two Wars: a Deep Dive into the Differences
Where there is conflict, there will also be those who are against it. Fights are inevitable when emotions run high and two differing opinions are at stake, which is often how wars are started. While many move towards violence, there are many others who are steadfastly against it. People will protest violence and invasion because they think of the human lives at stake. The United States declared war on Vietnam in 1955 to try and stop the threat of communism within Asian countries; the fighting would continue for two decades before the last remaining troops were removed in 1975, after which Vietnam fell under a Communist regime. The United States armed forces would come home with nothing to show for their efforts aside from the trauma of those who served. The Vietnam War would soon be regarded as one of America’s biggest failures that cost the lives of 282,000 men but also created discontent and anger across the country. The post-war response to the Vietnam War stands in contrast with the post-war response to World War II by the American people. The American involvement in World War II was only four years of fighting, and the soldiers who came home were regarded as heroes, whereas those who returned bruised and battered from Vietnam did not command the same welcome. These post-war reactions entered many aspects of American life and literature. Writing poetry served as a balm to help many soldiers come to terms with unimaginable horrors they lived through. Antiwar poetry is often defined by the reader based on whether they believe the poem to serve as a vessel implicating that war is inherently evil. The so-called antiwar poems of World War II were often ambiguous and they lacked intentionality, while the usually clear-cut antiwar poems produced during and after the Vietnam War focused on a lack of faith and reason.
World War II ended in two stages, on two fronts, where two vastly different fighting styles had taken place. The Western Front saw trench warfare as a significant style of fighting, while the Pacific Theatre focused on island hopping and naval power. Death and destruction appeared on both sides of the conflict. Many soldiers “shared among themselves and with their fellow soldiers the realities of the conflict and expressed their common struggles in verse,” where they learned to give “voice to the realities of the horrors they witnessed”(Goldensohn 3). Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” focused on this death and loss by describing one of the most challenging and dangerous jobs within the Air Force. In this quick-snapshot poem, Jarrell highlights the violence many airmen in the United States Army faced. The Ball Turrett was unique to American aircraft, and it allowed the most diminutive man aboard the plane to crawl inside, where he assumed the fetal position, and his parachute sat outside of the locked door. Mortality rates among these gunners were nearly 60%, and those that did survive were often never the same. In poetry, “who is authorized to speak about war and how it can be represented” is defined by experiences within the wartime era (Metres 1). Anti-war poetry does not always serve to critique how a nation fought or how they handled the years following these wars but to highlight the events that these soldiers experienced during their time in the trenches. After the fight had ended, many soldiers were devoted to the nation and the cause they fought for, and often would not question the reasons behind the war but would seek to come to terms with the violence.
One persistent argument about the poetry following World War II is the question of intent. Reporters, publishers, and politicians can take what a soldier has said out of context and use these ideas to craft their narrative of soldiers resentful of war. Often, these poems about World War II were taken out of context and used to perpetuate anti-war ideas when the writers had never intended for them to be works of anti-war literature at all. These poems serve as memories of experiences, not as a condemnation of war. For Jarrell, no one would have understood the extent of courage that it took a man to be a ball turret gunner “six miles from the earth” with all the world below them and a sautered dome holding them in place (Jarrell 3). “Brave young Americans climbed into these cramped capsules and went to war” and became brave heroes who took on one the hardest wartime jobs (Johnsen 41). People on the homefront would never have imagined this experience themselves without these views of the violence from the eyes that saw them.
John M. Pool
e wrote of a similar scene when he looked back on “The Death of a U-Boat,” which was intended to explain a world that those back in America had never seen. The small snapshot poem focuses on the exact moment that a U-boat is destroyed as a “blossom” of a “deadly flower” appearing among the waves (Poole 5). As with the ball turret, the average American citizen would never see a U-boat falling beneath the waves never to surface again. These destruction of U-boats left “silent eyes that have no smile” that sunk beneath the waves almost as though they had never been there at all (12). These snapshots served to look through the eyes of the soldiers that served for those who would probably never see a U-boat in their lifetime.
Outside of Pearl Harbor, the United States would not see the same level of fighting and destruction on its homefront that raged in Europe and the Pacific. News articles painted pictures of grand victories and the heroics of brave generals, but the poem that comes after tells the story of the average Private, witnessing things he never thought he would ever see. These soldier-written poems often lacked innocence and fascination in the world around them because of the violence these men lived in for so long. Cary Nelson assigns this to soldiers who need to “mourn war deaths” and “rationalize the killing power of modern weapons” in writing because these poems enable soldiers to come to terms with their feelings about what they have done and seen (Nelson 22). Modern soldier war poets, including those following the World Wars, “struggled with the practices of total war” once they left the war zone and had to reconcile the people they were fighting in contrast to the person they were before the war (23). Many of these poets who wrote following World War II were soldiers who came home and did not fully intend to write poetry that went against the war but merely wrestled with their feelings and memories. The speaker in these pieces often actively participated in war, fighting for their country and their rights. While many of their works have since been twisted to fit a narrative that they did not write, these stories of war continue to appear and paint a picture of the life that these men lived.
Tim O’Brien was in active combat during the Vietnam War and saw firsthand the destruction and damage that was inflicted on both sides of the conflict. He did not come home a hero who was paraded around town; he instead was a pariah for his part in the conflict, but O’Brien saw the truth often forgotten about those who tell of their wartime experience, which is that “a true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done” (The Things They Carried 89). War is a fight in which there will be winners and losers who never come home, and the men of World War II did not sugarcoat this reality but instead wrote accurate and therapeutic reactions to what they saw on the Western Front.
Even though many of these men wrote to reconcile their experiences, some wrote about their views on war. In William Stafford’s “The Objector,” the speaker tackles the complicated life of an objector to combat. Stafford, a pacifist, served in the Civilian Public Service camps from 1942 to 1946, where he wrote “The Objector” based on the belief that someone on the other side reflected his beliefs and was choosing to help in the war effort while refusing to fight. The young men of the Civilian Public Service gave in ways that did not require active combat, but Stafford wrote from personal experience to better understand his position during the war. From the beginning of his poem, Stafford references going against the grain by “cross[ing his] fork and spoon to ward off complicity” and establish his position (Stafford 1-2). Traditional placement of a fork and spoon would be to the side of the plate when not in use, but by crossing them, he is pushing back against society and pushing away service. The speaker of the poem knows what happens in war and what the government agencies in charge of the draft want their young men to commit to, but this pacifist soldier cannot align their morals with his own. The speaker recognizes that he is lucky to have the chance to stay out of the fray but that the other side’s “oppressive state” would not allow their men to stay away, whatever the reason may be (11). World War II had very little media presence on the two fronts, and most of their knowledge of the war came from soldiers’ letters home and the poetry, novels, and songs that appeared upon their return. For the objectors, on the other hand, Stafford is less specific about their acts of passivity, understanding that he can never know what happened to them because of the lack of information coming from the war. He is certain that those who share his beliefs agree “never to kill and call it fate” (14). Fate is a passive act binding people to do what life has laid before them and assumes that a high power has destined specific actions, but the narrator believes that killing is an active act that people choose. A higher power does not force people to kill people; they do that of their own free will. Violence is a creation from the minds and hearts of man. He is most certain, though, that there were men on the other side of the war who lay down their lives for their refusal to kill for the good of their nation. In this final line is an acknowledgment that he only has to bow his head, and others understand, but others bow their head,s never to raise them again.
Every division within the war had a different wartime experience across both wars. Battlelines stretched for hundreds of miles across mountains and over rivers. Some of these men fought from the air in ball turrets, others from naval vessels miles from shore, and some as infantrymen in the muddy trenches. Every person who fights or lays witness to war has a different experience. In 1975, Tim O’Brien spoke about the idea of every man fighting a different war, saying:
“Each soldier has a different war experience; in a war, a soldier sees only a tiny fragment of what is available to be seen. The soldier is not a photographic machine. He is not a camera. He registers, so to speak, only those few items that he is predisposed to register and not a thing more. … So I am saying to you that after a battle, each soldier will have different stories to tell, vastly different stories, and then when a war is ended, it is as if there have been a million wars or as many wars as there were soldiers.” (O’Brien,1975,236-37).
O’Brien also addresses the issue of how people can tell vastly different stories about the war, which was common amongst the soldiers of both World War II and the Vietnam War, but the introduction of film from the war zone during Vietnam earned it the title of the first televised war, meant the billions of people were writing about the war, many never setting foot on the ground in Vietnam. Cary Nelson blames part of this stark contrast on “isolationist sentiment” that arose at the onset of World War II that viewed the United States as a separate entity far removed from war (Nelson 424). In understanding any wartime literature, the reader should know that outside of Pearl Harbor in 1941, battles during World War II and Vietnam were never fought on American soil. These conflicts were often felt only in human capital, food rations, and economic imbalances that arose as a result of sending supplies to those fighting in the conflicts. Many of these problems are the reason that Vietnam saw a rise in anti-war literature on the homefront, as many struggled to cope with their upturned lives. Literature in the years following World War II “emphasized the war’s cost rather than its heroism” as many shell-shocked soldiers and widowed spouses reflected on how little it appeared that the nation gained following the end of the war (424). While men such as Stafford opposed the war on a personal level, his poetry was not considered to be anti-war in nature. Pacifism, while often crafting an anti-war mindset based on belief, does not begin as an anti-war belief alone but in a belief that peace is powerful and that men should do what they can to protect. These poems by men who fought in different ways were also based on experience and coming to terms with their part in the war. Contributing to the health of the army of the United States does not absolve these men completely; it simply serves to remind them that they did not actively take human life. These poems have since been called a “critique of wartime violence” based on the details established by these young men coming home and writing about the deaths they encountered. Randall Jarrell was a soldier who served within the Army Air Corps and often detailed the realities of fighting a war from the sky in both “The Death of the Ball Turrett Gunner” and “Loses,” where the speaker faces his responsibility in the war. “Loses” comes to terms with realizing that these young pilots were men following orders, saying:
“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.
When we lasted long enough they gave us medals;
When we died they said, “Our casualties were low.”
They said, “Here are the maps”; we burned the cities.” (Jarrell 21-28).
These young men are coming to understand the tragedy that they went through and coming to terms with the deaths that occurred on their watch. The speaker constantly reflects back on what “they said,” which references that soldiers were answering to high powers and doing as they were told, and death was the result (28). These young men were traumatized by what they were allowed to do, but their experiences were theirs alone, not moments highlighted on the nightly news. The critique offered here is one on the practices of how these attacks were carried out, which to the young soldiers appeared as though generals were throwing darts at a map and sending out a death sentence wherever that dart happened to land. These soldiers understood that World War II was a “necessary fight against nightmarish and demonstrably evil opponents” to preserve the world that they knew, but even a fight for what is right in the world does not come without consequence as many struggled to adjust to life on the home front following their years in service (Nelson 425). Neither poem calls for the war to end or lashes out at those who are fighting in service to the country but instead recognizes the moments within this war that defined the young soldier’s experience and helped them grow from boys into men.
While World War II left many people disenfranchised by the glory and heroism of war, The Vietnam War produced “the single largest body of US antiwar poetry was created in response to the Vietnam War and the substantial mass antiwar movement that developed in response,” which would go onto to define that generation (Nelson 428). These poets and their poetry note a shift within the intention of poems produced during and after wartime. Many of the civilian antiwar poets began writing during the war, but the soldiers who came home took years to come to terms with the war and begin writing their poems. For many people, poetry became how they coped and dealt with Vietnam as the war waged on and in the years following the unsuccessful siege. In those same years, antiwar activist Lawerence Rosenwald wished that “imaginative literature put its whole wisdom to work against war” to create a divide between literature created during wartime and literature created to oppose war (Rosenwald 156). The dichotomy between the two was brought into question during Vietnam as these two opposing worlds struggled to understand each other.
Poetry was a form of protest against the U.S. military prolonged stay in Vietnam that ultimately failed to do so. The soldiers who returned home following the war were disliked by those who did not fight but wanted someone to take the blame for what they believed to be a senseless war. Many of the antiwar poets of the Vietnam War era who wrote intentionally anti-war poetry were not soldiers, and many had never seen active combat. Still, many of them had lived in a nation at war for over a decade, a war that many on the homefront recognized as an impossible win and money pit draining resources and lives. The concern for human life was a major aspect of these poems on both sides of the conflict, which W. S. Merwin addresses in his poem, “The Asians Dying,” where he refers to the people lost as “ghosts” and the whole affair as “pointless” (Merwin 2,6). Born in 1927, Merwin was well known across the anti-war poetry scene but was not a former soldier. His poetry calls out the violence and destruction left by the Vietnam War, but his poetry was not a coping mechanism or a witness statement from a battle-hardened soldier. As the Vietnam War crept into its final years, Merwin became a practicing Buddhist, which furthered his anti-war and anti-violent ideals even further. Witness poets often portray the setting with startling accuracy, and the reader feels as though they are standing in the same spot that the speaker of the poem once stood. Still, Merwin’s images of “poisoned farmland” and simple “forests” do not call to mind a speci
fic place that he stood in, but a place that Merwin had only heard stories about (1, 15). Within Merwin’s poem, none of the nouns directly link the poem with Vietnam, leaving the assumption of where the poem takes place to the reader. These strong ideas about suffocation and loss, though are believed to be a by-product of the war. The lack of these proper nouns to display a connection between the images within the poem and the War in Vietnam tells the reader that Merwin never fought, nor did he know enough to give examples of the war that these people were fighting so far across the ocean.
James Schuyler also never fought in Vietnam, which gives him the appearance of another poet who wrote about the horrors of a war he did not fight in, but Schuyler served in the United States Navy in World War II. The end of the war left Schuyler with mental and physical reminders of the war, but it also inspired him to never go to war again, an outlook that may have shaped his antiwar views on Vietnam. The juxtaposition of life on the homefront versus what a soldier might see on the ground is reminiscent of the author’s own time in the Navy. While media coverage of the war drove several poets’ interpretations and inspired their imagery, Schuyler had gone to war and come home where “the grass here is gree,n” and life is many young people’s idea of perfect (Schuyler 11-12). The poem entitled “May 1972” speaks of the vast differences between a war zone and the homefront. By May of 1972, the Vietnam War was almost 18 years old, and the United States was no closer to winning the war than they were in the 1950’s. The country was in active protest over the course of the war, and Schuyler was living life on the homefront rather than serving on another naval vessel. Spring is a time of new beginnings, and young life often begins, but “Soft May mists are here again.” yet, “There, the war goes on,” which focuses on the idea that life has kept in so many places, but in Vietnam, the spring has failed to bring a new change and war continues on (1-2). Throughout the poem, the back and forth between the homefront and the war front reminds the reader that Schuyler has seen both sides of the coin now and realizes how vastly different these two places can be. The parallel moments between these two countries are the tone and image created in the poem as
“Beside the privet the creamy
white tulips are extra
fine this year. There,
foliage curls blackened back:
it will, it must
return. But when?
A cardinal enchants me
with its song.
All war is wrong. The grass
here is green and buttoned
down with dandelions. A car
goes by. What peace. It–
the war–goes on.” (Schuyler 3-15).
These moments created a place that could exist across the street from each other where one is filled with light and love while the other sees a world that still continues in darkness. The contrasting views remind the reader of how much some people have while others often lack. While Vietnam continued to be a war filmed by the media and many artists would have access to sources that told the whole story on film, Schuyler knows that the terror that took place in Vietnam is not his story to tell, so he leaves the war zone an ambiguous place where everything is overgeneralized. “Children are more valuable than flowers” is not an idea that is central to the Vietnam War movement ,though it was a popular recruitment topic when they were worried about what might happen to the future generation (22). Caring for children is a universal idea, and the speaker notes that bringing young boys home to their family will be worth more than any flowers that line a gravestone. All war comes with a cost, but few realize that losing soldiers means that someone lost a son and all they have left is to bring their sons and daughters flowers in cemeteries that house hundreds upon hundreds of people, and they would much rather hold their families tight than see them never return home. The poem understands that in these moments, heroics do not matter, only safety and security that one can have once the war is over. The speaker displays their understanding of a similar situation as it proclaims that “war must end” to bring people home safely and give the soldiers time to heal. The use of media within the Vietnam War left soldiers open to public scrutiny in a place where often the decision is life or death.
Many anti-war poets preferred to be tongue-in-cheek when expressing their discontent with the war, focusing on the individuals or reflecting on a time spent in service, but for Wendall Berry, this meant speaking out against everyone responsible. Humans can take the information given to them and decide how they are going to use certain ideas, but far too quickly, mob mentality can sink in and cause people to come together in support of common ideas. The question that is posed to those who have not decided how they feel about the war is:
“Believe the automatic righteousness
of whoever holds an office. Believe
the officials who see without doubt
that peace is assured by war, freedom
by oppression. The truth preserved by lying
becomes a lie. Believe or die.” (Berry 6).
Access to media influence meant that many questioned who they could trust when it came to the war. The Vietnam War occurred over the course of five presidents, which meant a swinging door of advisors and generals in charg,e which meant that when the public began to “believe an official” who reminded them that “peace is assured by war,” the war never ends begin to wonder in the problem rests in the enemies leadership or their own (3-4). Those in charge earn trust and belief, but the poem’s tone recognizes that the truth is becoming distorted, and it’s hard to see why the United States continues to go to war. Violence is available on every screen, and people are able to witness “freedom by oppression” acted out on people who are not responsible for the growth of communism (5). Violence was acted on the unsuspecting people of Vietnam in a way that replicated the small towns of the United States. Anyone at home could look around and see:
“Where are the quiet plenteous dwellings
we were coming to, the neighborly holdings?
We see the American freedom defended
with lies, the vision of Jefferson
served by the agony of children,
women cowering in holes.” (14-1
9).
For much of history, war was painted as an idea of great heroism and beauty. Landscape of large battles where two opposing sides met to decide the fate of two empires. War can be glamorous when people do not have to live and experience the reality. Photographs such as those taken at Gettysburg showed soldiers who fell in pursuit of their nation and who should be commended for honor and dignity. Newspapers from Vietnam brought pictures of “the agony of children” where the American public could see what was being done for “the vision of Jefferson” in another place (18-19). Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness seemed so easy to obtain, but the cost of so many women and children laid bare turned people against the war. The government alone could no longer control the narrative of war that plucked young boys up and brought them back dark and twisted. Every aspect of war was now accessible and people could decide their beliefs on the conflict based on what they saw rather than depending on what the soldiers saw and subsequently wrote about.
Poetry reduced as the result of the war will hold those wartime ideologies close. Many of these poets serve as witness to two of the biggest conflicts within the century where the public opinions of war significantly changed. Within a century, people no longer saw war as a glorious endeavor highlighting the strength of a nation, but as a dangerous endeavor that those in active combat rarely recovered from. Randall Jarrell and John M. Poole wrote poems based on a lived experience to cope with the war at hand, while W. S. Merwin and Wendall Berry wrote based on what they saw through media interference in Vietnam. These antiwar poets depended on what the media showed them to make claims about the horrors of war while the young men wrote about their darkest days which many believe serve in a similar capacity of antiwar poetry. Soldiers often need an outlet though they do not wish to critisize the war in which they fought, but intepretation lies with the reader who determines whether the poet speak out against war or reflects on experiences.
Works Cited
Nelson, C. (2022). American War Poetry. In A Companion to American Poetry (eds M.M. Balkun, J. Gray and P. Jaussen). https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119669760.ch34
Goldensohn, L. (2001). War and anti-war poetry. In E. L. Haralson (Ed.), Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century (1st ed.). Routledge. https://search.credoreference.com/articles/Qm9va0FydGljbGU6MTgyMDk5NA==?aid=101271
Johnsen, Frederick A. “Ball Turret: Shattering the Myths.” Air Power History, vol. 43, no. 2, 1996, pp. 14–21. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26287859. Accessed 10 Dec. 2024.
Metres, Philip. Behind the Lines : War Resistance Poetry on the American Home Front Since 1941, University of Iowa Press, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cofc/detail.action?docID=843108.
Rosenwald, Lawrence. “On Modern Western Antiwar Literature.” Raritan, vol. 34, no. 1, 2014, pp. 155-173,175. ProQuest, https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/on-modern-western-antiwar-literature/docview/1564440000/se-2.
Poetry
Berry, Wendall-The Poem Against The War in Vietnam
Jarrell, Randall-The Death of The Ball Turret Gunner
Poole, John M.-The Death of a U-Boat
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