Alan Seeger
(22 June 1888- 4 July 1916)

 
               Alan Seeger
(22 June 1888- 4 July 1916)
 
Alan Seeger grew up in New York City, spending most of his early youth on Staten Island, as well as in Mexico, where his businessman father moved the family for several years. Seeger returned to attend the Hackley School in Tarrytown, NY prior to entering Harvard as a member of the class of 1910. At Harvard, Seeger appears to have found an environment reasonably congenial to his interests, even though he initially shunned the social life it offered. In a letter he wrote to his sister from France in 1916, Seeger tells her that in his first two years he

was a devotee of Learning for Learning's sake…. The events of that life were positive adventures to me. Few, I am sure, have known more than I did then the employ of intellect as an instrument of pleasure. I shut myself off completely from the life of the University, so full, nevertheless, of pleasures. I scoffed at these pleasures that were no more to me than froth. I felt no need of comradeship. I led the life of an anchorite. (Letters and Diary 184)[1] 

Anchorites, religious recluses voluntarily confined to a single room, were more common in the medieval era than either before or after, and the term provides a glimpse of the medievalism that one finds throughout Seeger.
     The emotional and intellectual basis for this medievalism can be seen in a paper that Seeger wrote in the spring of 1908, “Suggestions for a Dissertation on the Historical Development of the Faust-motive.” His professor for Comparative Literature 7, M.A. Potter, responded favorably to Seeger’s essay, part of which was concerned with the historical nature of the Renaissance, which Seeger presents as a play of new and old:

It is simple enough to see the new impulses, but what shall be said of the things that are no more, of the spiritual light that has vanished out of men’s hearts? I suppose that it is only within recent years that the sophistication of three centuries has so far abated as to allow of a more correct and sympathetic estimate of the mediaeval world. (1)

Seeger decries the “sophistication” that has overwhelmed the “spiritual light” of the medieval, a spirituality that appeared to reassert itself before retreating once again:
"there was the sporadic impulse of the Romantic Revival, but not apparently based upon a mature enough self-consciousness to attain that perfection toward which it was progressing when blighted under the great returning tide of materialism that has afflicted the last half-century" (1). Seeger wanted to reverse this “tide of materialism” so that the “spiritual light” emanating from the medieval world might shine again.
            Seeger became part of the lively Harvard literary scene: he published in and served as an editor of the Harvard Monthly. In his senior year at Harvard, Seeger roomed with T.S. Eliot—who would go on to be one of the major American poets of the twentieth century--while Eliot, who had earned his BA in just three years, was working on his Master’s degree in philosophy (Miller 58). After graduation Seeger lived briefly in Greenwich Village before moving to Paris, where he was living at the outbreak of the war (Roberts 585-90, Hart 372).  
            Despite his talk of anchorites and spiritual life, Seeger was not conventionally religious. His view of the universe was apparently shaped by the Ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles, for whom nature was characterized by the interaction of two fundamental and opposing forces, love and strife. As Seeger explained it, this view of the universe determined his understanding of the proper attitude toward life:   

seeing, in the macrocosm, all Nature revolve about the twin poles of Love and Strife, of attraction and repulsion, so no less in the microcosm of my individual being I saw the emotional life equally divided between these two cardinal principles . . . . [M]y aspiration was to go all the gamut, to "drink life to the lees." My interest in life was passion, my object to experience it in all rare and refined, in all intense and violent forms. The war having broken out, then, it was natural that I should have staked my life on learning what it alone could teach me. (Letters and Diary 186)

Shortly after the war began Seeger enlisted in the French Foreign Legion, which offered Seeger an avenue to military service with France for a U.S. citizen (Howe, “Alan Seeger”). While service in the Foreign Legion was motivated in part by his love for France, it was also motivated by a deep-seated desire to experience war: after Seeger died from wounds received in combat in July 1916, a friend wrote that Seeger fought on the side of the French because he had been living in France, as he would doubtless have fought on the side of the Germans had he been living in Germany (Reeves 160). War was, after all, the surest embodiment of Strife in human experience.
            Seeger underwent his training during August and September 1914 in Toulouse in southern France before proceeding to the front as a member of the Second Regiment of the French Foreign Legion, as recorded in his Letters and Diary (pages 1-11). He went into the trenches along the River Aisne beginning in November, remaining there until late May. His regiment then moved around 35 miles to the southeast, into the Champagne, where it remained for three weeks before returning to the Aisne. Seeger’s regiment was sent to the rear in mid-July 1915, remaining there until mid-September, when it returned to the front for the Second Battle of Champagne. After this it was stationed in the rear for the winter of 1915-1916, during which time Seeger contracted a respiratory infection that required hospitalization and an extended period of recovery in Biarritz and Paris, from the beginning of February through the beginning of May 1916. Upon his recovery, Seeger returned to his unit, remaining with it until his death (Letters and Diary).
            Seeger’s death came in an attack on Belloy-en-Santerre in the early days of the Battle of the Somme. The fullest account of Seeger’s death—he was mortally wounded by machine gun fire--by his friend and fellow Legionnaire, Rif Baer, was published as a conclusion to his Letters and Diary. Seeger died on 4 July 1916. Even before his death, Seeger had provided a rallying point for Americans who believed that the United States should enter the war on the side of the Allies. After his death, Seeger provided an even more powerful symbol, while his death and the publication of his Poems and his Letters and Diary provided occasions for writing about him. He had already been compared to the iconic English soldier-poet Rupert Brooke before his death; afterward, such comparisons became nearly standard.
            As a poet, Seeger wrote unfailingly in closed form, employing regular meter and end rhyme, and often writing in established forms such as the sonnet or ode. He appears to have had no interest in the rapidly developing open form poetry, or "free verse" as it was often called. Eliot—one of the masters of open form--reviewing his old roommate’s Poems following their posthumous publication said, “The work is well done, and so much out of date as to be almost a positive quality.” Seeger’s poetic influences are clear: the medieval world generally, and the troubadour poets in particular, the Renaissance, both Italian (one of his heroes was Pico di Mirandolla, the Renaissance humanist) and English (Sir Phillip Sidney), and Romanticism—Lord Byron was another of his heroes, and one hears echoes of John Keats throughout the Poems.
            While there is enough variety in it to render any brief overview necessarily partial, four poems suggest the predominant mood and the range of Seeger’s war poetry.  The best-known poem by Seeger, “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” demonstrates many of his most characteristic traits. It is in closed form—it employs end rhyme and a regular iambic tetrameter meter (i SHALL not FAIL that RENdeVOUS)--although here the form is reasonably flexible. The rhyme scheme is irregular as is the length of the stanzas. This freedom within the confines of tradition carries over into the content of the poem, to some degree. Seeger reverses the conventional symbolic meaning of the seasons. Normally spring is associated with the restoration of life—something firmly grounded human’s natural being and expressed in countless poems and songs--but in this poem the arrival of spring becomes the occasion for death, or at least a meeting with death. Seeger’s reversal is grounded in a fact of war as it was then fought: spring was the time when large scale offensive operations resumed, and death became more likely. Seeger plays death off of the traditional association of spring with life, and contrasts the unpleasant--death--with the pleasant--“blue days and fair.”
            In other ways, though, “I Have a Rendezvous with Death” is firmly conventional, most notably in its romantic treatment of war. Seeger is strikingly literal in this: he uses the language of romance to describe war. He has a “rendezvous” with death, just as he might with a lover, and to his “pledged word” is “true,” again using the conventional language of love. Furthermore, his depiction of death as “Death” and his repeated use of the first-person singular “I” presents the experience of death in World War One as a highly personal affair, rather than as the largely anonymous matter that it was in a war in which most casualties from combat resulted from machine gun and artillery fire, a product of the industrialization of war. The personification, “Death,” individualizes death, and so Seeger’s acknowledgment of the very real possibility of death denies the form death most often took.
            Like “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” “Sonnet I” presents a romantic view of soldierly life.  The poem is addressed to Sir Phillip Sidney (1554-1586), poet, soldier, and courtier. Sidney, the “perfect flower” of the “heyday of romance,” was really a man of the early modern era, but he serves as an embodiment of an ideal of manhood that, for Seeger, contrasts with modern existence. As an undergraduate Seeger would have seen Sidney’s likeness pictured in stained glass windows in Harvard’s Memorial Hall, where Sidney is portrayed no less than three times. The upper portion of window number five shows Sidney holding in his left hand a piece of paper containing lines from his poem known as the Old Arcadia, with a sword at his hip: poet and warrior.
            “Sonnet I” is a Shakespearean or English sonnet, and so rhymes ABABCDCDEFEFGG. This produces three groups of four lines and a closing couplet, and Seeger uses these rhyming groups to organize the content of the poem. The first group of lines focuses on Sidney and his character as a warrior (“tourneyed with victorious lance”), poet (“brought sweet roundelays”), and lover (“to Stella’s bower”). The second group shifts focus to the speaker of the poem, who congratulates himself for avoiding the life dictated by modern values and instead patterning himself on the model of Sidney and the ideals of Sidney’s day. In the third group, we see what this means: rejecting material success in favor of freedom and happiness. The couplet concludes the poem by concentrating the values of such a life into three keywords: “Love and Arms and Song.” Like Sidney, Seeger is the quintessence of Romance--although Seeger feels that it makes him out of step with his time. 
            While Seeger was overwhelmingly romantic in his self-presentation and in his presentation of the war, he was not uniformly romantic. In “The Aisne (1914-1915)” he presents a more sober picture of life on the Western front—although even here he breaks this sober mood. The poem is based on Seeger’s experience: his Foreign Legion unit was stationed along the Aisne River, where the Germans and the French dug in following the First Battle of the Aisne, which concluded the counteroffensive of the Allies following the retreat of the Germans after the First Battle of the Marne.
            The language of the “The Aisne” is grimmer than elsewhere in Seeger, and its view of war more stark:              
                        In the chill trenches, harried, shelled, entombed,
                           Winter came down on us, but no man swerved.
                        ….
                        In rain and fog that on the withered hill
                           Froze before dawn, the lurking foe drew down;
                        Or light snows fell that made forlorner still
                           The ravaged country and the ruined town.
Uncharacteristically, the sheer grinding ugliness and unpleasantness of life at the front threatens to dampen even Seeger’s enthusiasm.
            But Seeger steers the poem in a different direction in the next stanza, where the sky clears and he offers a highly romantic picture of the front, where the stars in the winter sky, “Gleamed on our bayonets pointing to the north.” Seeger, committed to an aesthetic in which art should present the ideal, can bear only so much ugliness:
                        And the lone sentinel would start and soar
                        On wings of strong emotion as he knew
                        That kinship with the stars that only War
                        Is great enough to lift man's spirit to.
The poem moves away from the gritty realities of the war to the transcendence of War, which brings the speaker in touch with what he sees to be the elemental realities of life.
            The poem, however, does not end on this transcendent note. Seeger concludes in a stoical, modest mood unusual for him. In the last stanza the rhyme scheme, which is ABAB in the first eight stanzas and ABBA in stanzas nine through twelve, changes to AAXA, with the otherwise unrhymed long-i sound at the end of the third line of the stanza resonating with the “i” in “lines” in the last. Seeger also employs consonance, repeating the "l" sound twelve times in these four lines [the letter "l" occurs roughly twice as frequently as in normal usage ("English Letter Frequency")]:  
                        There where, firm links in the unyielding chain,
                           Where fell the long-planned blow and fell in vain --
                           Hearts worthy of the honor and the trial,
                        We helped to hold the lines along the Aisne.
Compared to the romantic “I” and the personified “Death” of “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” the humility and ordinariness of “We helped to hold the lines” is striking.
            Almost certainly the last poem Seeger wrote, “Ode in Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen for France” is a public poem. He intended to read it in Paris at an observance of the American Decoration Day holiday on May 30, 1916 but did not receive permission to leave the front (Letters and Diary 202). The poem is in irregularly rhymed lines of a rough iambic pentameter in sections of irregular length. In the first section, Seeger places the subjects of his poem in relation to those who served in the Civil War--a comparison fairly common in American World War One poetry. Seeger asserts the meaningfulness of the deaths of the American volunteers by presenting the Great War as “a war where Freedom was at stake,” not the way he usually viewed it; likely he frames it this way for public presentation.
            The second section, like the first, exploits the coincidence of Decoration Day (the name by which what became Memorial Day was commonly known in the northern U.S. in Seeger’s time) and spring. Interestingly, in this public poem, Seeger does not perform the ironic reversal of seasonal associations that we see in “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” instead remaining within the conventional symbolism of the seasons. Thus spring provides solace: the dead, like nature, are revived every spring, and revived in their youth. Death preserves the youth of those Americans who died in voluntary service to France.
            The third section reverses the sense of indebtedness one might expect in a poem such as this, so that it is not France who should thank the dead, but rather the dead who thank France. The dead are indebted because France has given them three things of great value:
                        … that grand occasion to excel,
                        That chance to live the life most free from stain
                        And that rare privilege of dying well.
France has given the volunteers the opportunity to display their military prowess, to live virtuously, and to die well. All three contrast with what would become the dominant literary understanding of the war in the postwar era. But it is “That rare privilege of dying well” that contrasts most powerfully, since Ernest Hemingway responds to the sentiment, and almost certainly to the poem, in “Champs d’Honneur, ” whose first line negates Seeger’s sentiment: “Soldiers never do die well.”
            The fourth section of the “Ode” becomes more overtly political, although not clearly partisan; this would violate the decorum of the ode, an elevated form. Seeger offers a lightly veiled rebuke to Woodrow Wilson and others who support American neutrality in the war and suggests that the failure of the United States to intervene indicates that it has declined from the past known by those dead who are honored on Decoration Day. Seeger combines his typical romantic view of warfare with something slightly less idealized. He instructs his audience to “cry: ‘Now heaven be praised’,”
                        “Accents of ours were in the fierce mêlée;
                        And on those furthest rims of hallowed ground
                        Where the forlorn, the gallant charge expires,
                        When the slain bugler has long ceased to sound,
                        And on the tangled wires
                        The last wild rally staggers, crumbles, stops,
                        Withered beneath the shrapnel's iron showers: --
                        Now heaven be thanked, we gave a few brave drops;
                        Now heaven be thanked, a few brave drops were ours."
The vision of war is still predominantly romantic, but the reality of industrialized warfare, “the tangled wires” and “the shrapnel’s iron showers,” is at least glimpsed.
            In its last section, the ode concentrates on death, idealizing the dead and contrasting them with the living:
                        There, holding still, in frozen steadfastness,
                        Their bayonets toward the beckoning frontiers,
                        They lie -- our comrades -- lie among their peers,
                        Clad in the glory of fallen warriors,
                        Grim clusters under thorny trellises,
                        Dry, furthest foam upon disastrous shores,
                        Leaves that made last year beautiful, still strewn
                        Even as they fell, unchanged, beneath the changing moon;
                        And earth in her divine indifference
                        Rolls on, and many paltry things and mean
                        Prate to be heard and caper to be seen.
                        But they are silent, calm; their eloquence
                        Is that incomparable attitude;
                        No human presences their witness are,
                        But summer clouds and sunset crimson-hued,
                        And showers and night winds and the northern star.
While the dead are “our comrades,” they are different from the speaker and the audience: they have entered eternity and left the world of human concerns. This conception allows Seeger to write some of his most successful lines: “Dry, furthest foam upon disastrous shores,/Leaves that made last year beautiful, still strewn/Even as they fell, unchanged, beneath the changing moon.” Not only are the dead different from the living, they are also superior, even to their comrades. Seeger’s embrace of death—seen also in “Liebestod” brings him very close to the kind of decadence one sees in fellow poet Harry Crosby—an ambulance driver during the war.
            The superiority of the dead to the living is so great that Seeger and others who, like him, attempt to praise them are unworthy to do so:  
                        … even our salutations seem profane,
                        Opposed to their Elysian quietude;
                        Our salutations calling from afar,
                        From our ignobler plane
                        And undistinction of our lesser parts. (174)
The poem thus runs into a conflict between this-worldly praise for those who have died serving the cause of France and an idealization of the dead that veers toward an idealization of death, a conflict Seeger never attempts to resolve since he concludes the poem in a mere three lines.
            With his commitment to traditional, closed form poetics and his romanticization of the war, Seeger was quickly eclipsed, at least among critics, by other poets—E.E. Cummings and Ezra Pound, for example--writing a very different kind of poetry. Yet Seeger was a reasonably accomplished poet of his kind, and his enthusiasm for the war, while it might seem mistaken was both genuine and representative of a powerful element in American culture at the time. And the tension—perhaps contradiction—between his romanticized, medievalist vision of the war and its modern, industrialized character might tell us as much as the more severe and unromantic poetry that followed the war's conclusion.

                                                       Works Cited

Eliot, T.S. Unsigned review of Poems by Alan Seeger. The Egoist. 4.11
     (1917): 172.
"English Letter Frequency." <https://www.math. cornell.edu>.
Hart, James A. “Alan Seeger.” American Poets, 1880- 1945: First Series.
     Ed. Peter Quartermain. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 45.
     Detroit: Gale, 1986.371-75.
Hemingway, Ernest. "Champs d'Honneur." Three Stories and  Ten
     Poems. Paris: Contact Publishing, 1923.
Howe, M.A. DeWolfe. “Alan Seeger, Class of 1910.” Memoirs of the
     Harvard Dead in the War Against  Germany . Vol. 1. Cambridge,
     MA: Harvard University Press, 1920. 109-24. 
Miller, James E. T.S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet. University
     Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005.
Reeves, Harrison. “The Tragedy of Alan Seeger.” The New Republic 10
     (1917): 160-62.
Roberts, Walter Adolphe. “The Alan Seeger I Knew.” The Bookman: A
     Review of Books and Life 47.6 (1918): 585-90. 
Seeger, Alan. Letters and Diary. New York: Scribner’s, 1917.
---. “Suggestions for a Dissertation on the Historical Development of
     the Faust-motive: An Essay.” bMS AM 1578.1 (7). Houghton
     Library, Harvard University.
Seeger, Charles, Sr. Letter to R. Bridges. 21 March 1917.  Seeger, Alan,
     1888-1916. Archives of Charles Scribner’s Sons, (C0101).
     Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special
     Collections, Princeton University Library.
 

[1] In the Letters and Diary, this letter is identified as being written “To a Friend” by Seeger, rather than to his sister, as it clearly was; the original is in Harvard’s Houghton Library. Seeger’s father, Charles, Sr., assembled the Letters and Diary for Scribner’s (Letter to R. Bridges, 21 March 1917).