‘But Freebourne loved its steel’: American Great War poetry, modernity, and mobilization

Abstract

ABSTRACT Considerable attention has been given to American writers, including poets, who in the 1920s expressed disillusionment with US participation in the war. As such, these writers participated in a Modernist critique of the ideologies that supported US efforts to use the war as a lever to propel the United States into pre-eminence in a global capitalist system. My article focuses, rather, upon the ways that some poets during the war were already satirizing or otherwise resisting the US world hegemonic project. This iconoclastic work appeared in two distinct forms. On the one hand, some poets often affiliated with marginal political groups, sought intentionally to expose the socio-economic and self-interested underpinnings of ideologies of family loyalty, social altruism, democracy, and the rule of law that were promulgated to justify US intervention. Most vociferous in these critiques were socialist poets, particularly Arturo Giovannitti and Ralph Chaplin, but other critics were affiliated with the most militant branches of the Woman’s Peace Party, such as Florence Tuttle and Bernice Evans. On the other hand, an implicit critique of the idealistic rhetoric justifying US intervention might also be found in certain poems honestly depicting the technologies of modern warfare, even if the poets in question sought a neutral or supportive stance towards the US war effort. Such work was produced both by soldier poets such as John Allan Wyeth and Baker Brownell and by civilians like John Curtis Underwood, a voluminous Whitmanian chronicler of the war. Exposing the hollowness of patriotic cant already during the war years, these poets stressed the cruel facts that the war would not be won by that side with the better principles or less hypocritical ideological formations, but by that side more successful in employing the killing potential of industrial tools and mass organization.