The War Sonnets of John Allan Wyeth: A Yank at the Battle of Amiens: The Chipilly Ridge Sonnets of John Allan Wyeth

Friday, August 10, 2018

A Yank at the Battle of Amiens: The Chipilly Ridge Sonnets of John Allan Wyeth

This essay, in its entirety, is included in the newly-released book Before the Clangor of the Gun: the First World War Poetry of John Allan Wyeth.

Here is an excerpt:

"The night of August 8-9. Gas masks on, and led by runners, lieutenants Wyeth and Cochrane set out on foot, in search of 2nd Battalion headquarters, situated roughly six hundred yards to the south, close to the river. Everywhere there are ominous signs of "evil creeping in the dark." With steel helmets for laurel, Virgil and Dante unholster their sidearms and wend their way through the Inferno of the Somme. Horse-drawn artillery crashes by, and columns of rushing soldiers, with both man and beast wearing alien masks in a futuristic nightmare, or a scene out of Bosch. A distant sneeze and their own burning eyes tell them that they are venturing into an area of lethal gas, and then they cross paths with their first gas victim, "... blind twisting head and drunken knees, ~ like Christ." ~~ and with that final image of Golgotha, the apocalyptic scene is complete."

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"Of all the writers of the Lost Generation, there was perhaps none quite so lost as John Allan Wyeth. Until his 1928 book of war poems was reprinted by Fitzgerald scholar Matthew Bruccoli in 2008 (This Man's Army, Univ of SC Press), Wyeth’s literary reputation was non-existent. Not a single scholar of the period had written about him, or even heard of him, and his poems appeared in no anthology of First World War literature from the 1930s to the present. Yet it might have been otherwise. Wyeth had all the requisite credentials of the time for literary fame: an Ivy League education, participation in the World War, followed by nearly two decades as an itinerant expatriate in London, Liège, Paris, Holland, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Provence, Italy and Greece, first as a poet, and then as a painter. Moreover, he was known to Edmund Wilson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, members of the Bloomsbury Group and Ezra Pound. His cycle of modernist war sonnets, when it appeared a year before A Farewell to Arms and All Quiet on the Western Front, was perceptively and appreciatively reviewed in a handful of journals, including Poetry. Yet Oblivion followed, swift and absolute, for the next eighty-odd years. Such are the inexplicable vagaries of literary fortune ..."

from BJ Omanson's "John Allan Wyeth: Lost Poet of the Lost Generation". The Best American Poetry. 27 May 2012. (see link below)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

THE ROAD TO BAYONVILLERS

The sidecar skimmed low down like a flying sled
over the straight road with its double screen
of wire--the blue profile of Amiens sank
below the plain--near by, a hidden blast
of gunfire by the roadside--just ahead,
a white cloud bursting out of a slope of green.
Then low swift open land and the wasted flank
of a leprous hillside--over the ridge and past
the blackened stumps of Bois Vert, bleak and dead.
Our sidecar jolted and rocked, twisting between
craters, lunging at every rack and wrench.
Through Bayonvillers--her dusty wreckage stank
of rotten flesh, a dead street overcast
with a half-sweet, fetid, cloying fog of stench.

Wyeth links

The Joseph M. Bruccoli Great War Series of "lost" literary classics of the First World War. Matthew J. Bruccoli, series editor.

Cadby, Alex. "I have no words to speak of war": The Problem of Silence in the Soldier Poetry of the First World War and Present Day". Student dissertation from the University of Exeter containing a discussion of two of Wyeth's sonnets.

Gioia, Dana. "The Unknown Soldier: The Poetry of John Allan Wyeth". The Hudson Review, Vol LXI, No 2 (Summer 2008). This article appeared again as the introductory essay in the 2008 University of South Carolina Press republication of This Man's Army.

Gioia, Dana. "This Man's Army by John Allan Wyeth, Jr. (1894-1981)". "Recall Roster: recalling forgotten, neglected, underrated, or unjustly out-print-works" in War, Literature & the Arts Journal, Vol 16, Nos 1 & 2 (2004).

Huidekoper, Frederic Louis. The History of the 33rd Division A.E.F. Illinois State Historical Library, 1921.

Kendall, Tim. "French Brothels in Wartime". War Poetry blog. 1 May 2009.

Kendall, Tim. "Long-lost American Poet of the Great War". War Poetry blog. 26 May 2009.

Kendall, Tim. "John Allan Wyeth: 'Souilly: Hospital'". War Poetry blog. 28 February 2010.

Laskin, David. "Refracting war through American vernacular poetry". 14 February 2010.

Omanson, BJ. "John Allan Wyeth: Lost Poet of the Lost Generation". The Best American Poetry blog. 27 May 2012.

Preston, John Hyde. "Poetry, Giants and Lollypops". The Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 1929. An enthusiastic review of This Man's Army as part of an omnibus review of new poetry titles of 1928. ". . . a corking, exciting piece of work . . . "

Ruzich, Connie. "Picnic". A discussion of Wyeth's poem "Picnic: Harbonnières to Bayonvillers," from the Behind Their Lines blog, 21 October 2017.

Ruzich, Connie. "Transport". A discussion of Wyeth's poem "The Transport, I" from the Behind Their Lines blog, 11 June 2017.

Sisson, JB. "A War in Fifty-Odd Sonnets: A reveiw of John Allan Wyeth's This Man's Army. Trinacria. Issue #2, Fall 2009.

Walton, Eda Lou. Review of This Man's Army in "A Sheaf of Poetry", The Saturday Review of Literature, (April 13, 1929).

Williams, Lisa. Review of This Man's Army in The Hollins Critic, (April 1, 2009).