The American Poets Project

...A line from one of the Whispers of Heavenly Death poems thus resonates with more meanings than we might have realized: "All sorrow, labor, suffering, I tallying it, absorb it into myself...

...We see him as the original quasihistorical figure...

...Bloom echoes many others in positing that Whitman's "crucial" works, besides the early "Song of Myself," are: "The Sleepers," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life," "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd...

...Shapiro was at his peak during the War when his insouciant skepticism fitted the tenor of the times...

...From that perspective, Bloom could be the ideal person to help us penetrate this verse more deeply...

...The originality, charm and power of his early poems lie in their eagerness to render aspects of the American experience never before given the dignity of high rhetoric...

...For Whitman, the 'tally' has a range of meanings: to count up one's poems, to constitute a double agreement, to notch one's score of autoerotic episodes upon a cutting...

...In addition to acting professionally, she wrote successful plays as well as the libretto to Deems Taylor's opera, The King's Henchman, which premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in 1927...

...In fact, asMcClatchy indicates, ina 1937 essay Ransom did not blush to fault the supremely feminine Edna for "deficiency in masculinity...

...Readers too young to remember that time might be forgiven for thinking a greater unity of purpose existed in this country before the attack on Pearl Harbor...

...Even at their most biting, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen struck a heroic note, penning anthems for "doomed youth" and the destruction of innocence...

...Among the soldiers in this anthology, Jews tend to show the strongest sense of what they were fighting for...

...he is heroized...

...You have to know his major poems intimately to render them justice, or for them to alter you, at least as a reader...

...Vincent Millay (231 pp., $20.00...

...But his way of describing them is distinctly his own: "Whitman has everything riding on these five poems, like a high-stakes gambler going for broke...

...He then takes us back to 1917 when the poet, still a Vassar student yet already published, began attending literary salons in New York: "She looked like a candle: small, intense, pale, with hair the color of fire...

...All that does seem to apply in "Drug Store" (1942): Youth comes to jingle nickels and crack wise...

...They [did] not glory in brotherhood and they [did] not, as a rule, find nobility in one another...

...Shapiro discovered he had outlived his era...

...McClatchy further includes a portion of the extended poem Millay read on NBC radio in 1942, The Murder of Lidice, about the Nazi massacre of a Czech village, plus excerpts from her book-length dialogic series...

...Commenting on Millay's predilection for the venerable sonnet form, McClatchy submits that she was "one who wished to extend a tradition rather than upend it...

...and Harvey Shapiro devotes Poets of World War II (262 pp., $20.00) to demonstrating that they produced as significant a body of work as the more anthologized bards of World War I. Only Harold Bloom, who rounds out the initial quartet, concentrates on an undisputed "great" in Walt Whitman (221 pp., $20.00...

...The Introduction, therefore, ought to be accessible to the novice, not solely the seasoned aficionado...

...Those familiar with the Bloomian canon will recognize these strands from his ongoing monologue—his own version of Whitman's "And what I assume you shall assume...

...What is most frustrating about Shapiro is how he nearly rises to greatness on numerous occasions, then slips back into jocular irony or a contrived O. Henry ending...

...They were astonished at the way their lives had been altered...

...The selection of poems is excellent, although somewhat less unusual than Bloom implies...

...This volume reprints two passages from that effort and her entire one-act Aria da Capo—an enduring staple of high school drama groups prized for its ironic juxtaposition of brittle drawing room farce with the horrors of war...

...Behind the flamboyant self-presentation is a quieter, less certain autobiography—the small, sweating actress inside the heavy lion costume...

...Bloom gives an idea of the richness of the poet's lyrics by explicating a favorite term of his: "The word 'tally' is founded upon the Latin talea, a cutting or twig...

...Still, if forced to choose one volume of selected verse from what Bloom calls "the central voice of American literature," I would probably opt for this one...

...Three of them are devoted to refreshingly unexpected choices: J.D...

...That mood is generously represented in Poets of World War Was well...

...The poet's tone is breezy, surly, rapturous as the mood rapidly shifts...

...Many who saw combat, he tells us, "viewed themselves as individuals caught in a giant machine...

...Rhyme and meter rapidly lost favor...

...Conversation at Midnight...

...It, too, has elements of the dramatic, for it recounts an adulterous affair with poems alternately addressed to the still-beloved husband and the much younger other man...

...After reading his claim that he has restored "two powerful passages" Whitman cut from the 1881 version of "The Sleepers," I found they were also included in all five reprints in my personal library...

...He tapped into the mindset of soldiers who believed in their cause yet acknowledged that they were sometimes used as cannon fodder by their leaders...

...Allow yourself to be caught up in his empathetic understanding of her artistry, then turn to the sound of her own verse...

...In contrast t? Whitman, who struggled for half a lifetime before gaining a place in the American pantheon, Karl Shapiro saw his reputation take off like a rocket, and then sputter...

...In the clean war, the war in the air...

...His first poetry collection appeared in 1942...

...As Shapiro puts it, their approach was often "bawdy, bitchy, irreverent...

...His verse from this period evokes something of the bittersweet atmosphere of the late Bill M auldin's Willie and Joe cartoons...

...But once Faust ends up at Los Alamos, involved in the first nuclear test, the obviousness of this conclusion deflates what has come before...

...Updike observes that in his subject's writing, "an urban, commercialized, industrial environment is illumined and cherished...

...In "Song of Myself," when Walt Whitman wrote "I contain multitudes," he captured the essence of a nation then inching up on its first centennial...

...It was the sound of the ax on fresh wood.'" The choice of Millay is a timely one...

...Unfortunately, the vagaries of fashion deserted the formalist movement by the 1960s...

...Two recent biographies revived interest in her as a personality—reveling in details of her drinking, morphine addiction and promiscuity with both sexes—but were hardly critical reassessments...

...Words of exaltation from a Great War lyric by John McCrae, "In Flanders Fields," were carved into the memorial windows of schools in the 1940s and '50s: "To you from failing hands we throw/ The torch...

...A major purpose of books of selected poems is to attract readers to works they may not know, or have read only in a cursory fashion...

...Stared through, that scrim yields to the stage set beyond, on which is played out the poem's emotional script...

...This engaging series provides one more opportunity to listen to America sing its various carols...

...these men usually felt less than heroic while in action because they were too exhausted to feel much of anything...

...The Millay collection is the most cohesive...

...why a riff has been inserted on how "American religion" is "post-Christian," uninfected by European tradition...

...modes that had been adopted by Auden and the young Robert Lowell were suddenly considered suitable only for the "light verse" of Ogden Nash or Phyllis McGinley...

...But those who survived battles of the second conflict to become important poets avoided the attempt to sound noble, or to celebrate fallen comrades...

...In a brilliant reading of one of her early sonnets from 1917, he illustrates how anxiety for the safety of a lover encapsulates the fears Americans felt about their "boys" fighting in the trenches of France...

...Jane Austen, for example, is to this day disparaged for writing domestic comedies instead of novels about soldiers in the Napoleonic wars...

...Shapiro, a B-17 gunner, takes pains to show the spectrum of opinion that actually existed and how it evolved...

...And in a voice surprisingly deep and exquisitely controlled, she would read her latest poem...

...McClatchy shows that Millay's poems address wider concerns than might at first be apparent...

...After Pearl Harbor, of course, backing for the Allied effort grew, but a range of viewpoints remained...

...Louis Untermeyer...

...Her adoring audience, though, felt betrayed once she became a political activist in later life, using her art to speak out against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927 and the German occupation of Czechoslovakia during World War II...

...Auden, and was hailed as a significant literary figure while still a soldier in World War II...

...Supported by a gift in honor of the late James Merrill, an eminent arts patron and the leading lyricist of his generation, it is designed to offer "a compact national library" of verse, "selected and introduced by distinguished poets and scholars...

...his last in 1998...

...His objective is to show that the American poets of the Second World War were as significant as their English counterparts in the first one, if different in tone...

...The first four volumes are indeed svelte and attractive, but provide much to contemplate...

...She preferred to use a familiar language to speak of unfamiliar matters, the better to deal ironically with the heart's history...

...as the editor notes, it will "touch the heart, disturb the intelligence, and lodge in the memory...

...That vulnerable aspect of Millay can be glimpsed in some of her sonnets, especially in the long sequence Fatal Interview, given here in full...

...Harold Bloom's Walt Whitman is not likely to have the same appeal...

...and what on earth "Whitmanian troping" might be...

...Whitman demands, and rewards, preternaturally close reading, the kind that I believe is allied to possession-by-memory...

...And, as Shapiro points out, poems by infantrymen who encountered the enemy face to face are quite different from those by airmen such as Howard Nemerov: "For a saving grace, we didn't see our dead...

...Randall Jarrell characterized Shapiro's poems, with palpable ambivalence, as "fresh and young and rash...

...He is the customer...

...he shares his subject's faith that we are capable of understanding the thought, no matter how foreign, of a powerful writer: "Criticism, of all varieties, has been largely defeated by Whitman, and the currently fashionable stuff—Foucault-historicist, 'Homosexual Poetic,' BioDeterminist—is only another impasse...

...Bloom's essay, however, will probably baffle anyone unfamiliar with his idiosyncrasies, even if they are acquainted with the quirks of the Good Gray Poet...

...He nevertheless gamely continued to write and publish until his death in 2000 at the age of 86...

...There is something theatrical at the heart of her work," he observes...

...To current sensibilities, though, that passage sounds as quaintly passé as the shop it depicts...

...remembered that 'there was no other voice like hers in America...

...the way bodies were washed up on the shores of invasion beaches or left as markers along the trail to show the new infantrymen moving forward the face of death...

...On the other hand, many pilots and bombardiers suffered emotionally over what they had not seen up close, like the firebombing of Dresden...

...While that attack now sounds politically incorrect to us, the thinking behind it, only slightly disguised, continues to blight the names of numerous women authors...

...They do, in fact, have a quality of prodigal energy, as if everything had been lavished on them in a doubleor-nothing gesture...

...He goes on to point out that "tallywags" or "tallywhacks" are slang expressions for the male genitalia in England and parts of the United States...

...and as a character in Marlowe, puppet plays and Goethe...

...be yours to hold it high...

...McClatchy's passionate directness matches Millay's...

...The baseball scores are his, the magazines Devoted to lust, the jazz, the Coca-Cola, The lending-library of love's latest...

...as the alchemists' hero...

...Millay loved the theater...

...In opening the book Harvey Shapiro writes: "We were victorious, but the sight of dead bodies is scattered among these poems...

...John Updike polishes up another faded star in Karl Shapiro (197 pp., $20.00...

...The Sappho of the Jazz Age, as she was sometimes called, developed a songlike formalist style, forging what McClatchy terms "silvery structures...

...The memorials sought to extend to the victims of WWII the veneration that had been accorded their predecessors...

...He implies that the half-forgotten writer is indeed a minor poet, but a good one: "His habits of mind were restless and contrarian...

...He adds that her oeuvre "will strike many contemporary ears as overly literary, but that is just a scrim her colored lights are trained on...

...The jokiness of "crack wise" is too clever by half...

...John Updike's Introduction to Karl Shapiro is uncharacteristically dry, almost academic...

...McClatchy opens his Introduction with a brief reminder of the critical eclipse his subject's reputation has suffered over the last six decades...

...He wrote formalist lyrics, clinging to the long coattails of masters like W.H...

...In this, as in much else, she resembles Lord Byron, who made himself into a glamorous and rakish character and then wrote about that character as if he were writing about himself...

...McClatchy focuses his attention on rehabilitating a wounded reputation in Edna St...

...William Stafford, who was decades younger, picked up the pacifist thread...

...The uninitiated will wonder why there is so much talk about Shakespeare...

...their hard clear outline, their flat bold colors create a world like that of a knowing and skillful neoprimitive painting, without any of the confusion or profundity of atmosphere...

...In "Defeat," Witter Bynner expressed outrage that German POWs were treated better than our own segregated black troops...

...Shapiro's collection and the three other inaugural volumes in the American Poets Project remind us of the rich diversity of the voices produced by this country...

...The Progress of Faust" (1947) imaginatively follows the notorious soul-seller through various incarnations down through the ages...

...Poets too old for service like Allen Tate and Robinson Jeffers deplored the impulse to fight, sounding similar to today's demonstrators against military action in Iraq...

...The poet, too, spent much of his career gradually winning readers over to unconventional views and a highly personalized manner of expressing them, until he won acceptance...

...Modernists damned Millay for her "lack of intellectual interest," in the condescending words of no less a tastemaker than John Crowe Ransom...

...Yet the hushed, introspective tone plays against the melodrama of the situation and makes the cycle one of her most moving creations...

...Many have dismissed this kind of verse, which makes a direct emotional appeal to readers and requires little expert analysis or classroom discussion to unpack its message...