One cannot tell the story of our nation without also telling the story of our wars. And these often harrowing tales are best told by the men and women who lived them. Today’s American military is the best trained and best educated in our nation’s history. These men and women offer unique and important voices that enlarge our understanding of the American experience. Looking at the great literary legacy of soldier writers from antiquity to the present, I cannot help but expect that important new writers will emerge from the ranks of our latest veterans. Dana Gioia, chair NEA
Gioia is describing “high seriousness”; great art brings laughter, even belly laughter, but is, in the end, highly serious about the nature of man.
I�ve never liked modern poetry much, but a survey course in the second half of American lit has to spend time on Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens. It may look at Williams and Pound. The �has to� probably signals my age and the fact that I spent the eighties and into the nineties ignoring lit crit. So be warned, this is an amateur at work. Still, I do believe it �has to�, so I�ve been trying to come to terms with them and only intermittently succeeding. Soon, however, I noticed how central to modernism was the break with tradition of World War I: Frost returned as the war started, with his first books at the critic�s; Eliot stuck in England came to feel at home there while writing of the alienated �Prufrock� in 1917; and Stevens, too, found his unique form during those years, as �Sunday Morning� was published in 1915. We generally think of World War I poets as Brits and with good reason. They fought the war, took it as their subject; some died, others were scarred. These Americans (unlike Hemingway, e.e. cummings, Faulkner) were not affected directly. But it is interesting, possibly important, that they as well as many others found their distinctive voices at that time.