Writing War Poetry like a Woman

Abstract

Like military itself, traditionally most overtly male of preserves, canon of poetry of presented in recent bibliographies or anthologies is especially and intensely androcentric. modern poem as it is usually defined, experience of masculine soldier and voice of masculine author predominate. A reader of didactic discussions of poetry written during Second World War might therefore be surprised at frequency with which American literary critics held up a text written by a woman as single, paradigmatic, exemplary poem: Marianne Moore's In of Merits. W. H. Auden, for instance, called In Distrust the best of... all poems of World War II.1 Moore was so lionized on American home front, her poem so praised, that RandallJarrell began his famous critical answer to In Distrust with a mock-apologetic Miss Moore is reviewed not as a but as an going on to cite, acerbically, a reviewer who had called Moore the greatest living poet and then demanded that she be placed in Fort Knox for duration.2 The uses of Moore as institution, for duration, deserve closer study than Jarrell's ironies might suggest; they shed light on assumptions prevalent in both 1940s and 1980s about what war means, what