Among the Nightmare Fighters: Americans Poets of World War II by Diederik Oostdijk

Abstract

Among Nightmare Fighters: Americans Poets of World War II. Diederik Oostdijk. Columbia, SC: U South Carolina P, 2011. 304 pp. $49.95 (hardcover).Among Nightmare Fighters offers an illuminating if partial survey of World War II's importance history of American poetry and poetics. Oost- dijk argues that, despite their stereotype of belonging to generation, mid-twentieth-century poets who experienced war either first-hand or on home front did fact speak out, albeit often in quiet and undemonstrative way and sometimes years afterward (3). Their reticence, he explains, stemmed partly from having witnessed events [ . . . ] too devastating to capture words but also from belief that the history of World War II was already fixed American imagination and that their personal musings would have no major im- pact (2-3). To illustrate value of what soldiers, veterans, and conscientious objectors did manage to write, he focuses on single tight-knit circle of poets, a generation of white, male, so-called academic poets who published their po- ems Kenyon Review, New Yorker, and Partisan Review and who came to prominence 1940s and 1950s (5). These writers-including John Ciardi, James Dickey, Anthony Hecht, Randall Jarrell, Lincoln Kirstein, Robert Lowell, Howard Nemerov, Karl Shapiro, and William Stafford-collectively [ . . . ] show that effects of war are ultimately shattering to all individuals caught it, es- pecially any simple equation of war and masculinity (5).The book is carefully organized. Its parts each take up one of four fixa- tions works and lives of poets of World War II that are distinct but inter- related (13): literary traditions that intertextually haunted them, namely, example of the English poets of World War I, Anglo-American high mod- ernists, New Critics, and W. H. Auden (70); preoccupation with self that resulted many autobiographically tinged (75); rejection of the soldier as masculine ideal and redefinition of manliness as founded intel- lectual curiosity, broadmindedness, and [ . . . ] independence from social pres- sure (176); and uncertainty whether to write or remain silent about their traumatic experiences during war years (234). Each of book's parts is further subdivided into chapters, some of which are wide-ranging and oth- ers of which delve an extended manner into particular writers and bodies of work. Throughout, Oostdijk blends careful close reading and historical recon- struction. He makes particularly good use of archival material, and is able to rein- troduce familiar lyrics, such as Lowell's Christmas Eve under Hooker's Statue, as well as to bring to light war-themed poems that his favored authors wrote but, for whatever reason, chose not to publish, such as Ciardi's Sarko, which he speaks as and for Holocaust survivor (118).In some cases, Oostdijk's narrative revisits well-trod terrain. It is no surprise, for instance, to hear that Jarrell aimed to create type of democratic poetry that re- flected reality of people's daily lives, mostly as victims of forces they could neither change nor fully understand, written language that was immediately accessible (111), nor is it jolting to hear that Lowell, despite his erratic and per- haps opportunistic flip-flopping between support of and opposition to war, nonetheless consistently channeled his confusion about his identity and place world into strong public stands on politics and religion (108). More impressive, as well as admirably balanced, are his retelling of other, trickier stories, such as Shapiro's flirtation with Catholicism and Dickey's occasional, insufferable bouts of hypermasculinity. Among Nightmare Fighters truly comes into its own, though, at moments when its author's enthusiasm for subject at hand becomes palpa- ble. …