Love, arms and song, and a noble frankness that asserts, "My kingdom is of this world," characterise America's leading soldier poet, who fell in action on 4th July 1916.
Alan Seeger was born in New York in 1888, of old New England parentage. For ten years Staten Island, in the mouth of the harbour, was his home. Later the family settled at Mexico City, in the tropics, but 7400 feet above the sea. He entered Harvard in 1906 and came to Paris in 1912, and, when the war broke out, was among the first half-hundred of his countrymen to enlist in the Foreign Legion of France, and soon writes from the Front:
"I have always thirsted for this kind of thing, to be present where the pulsations are liveliest. Every minute here is worth weeks of ordinary experience. . . . This will spoil one for any other kind of life. . . . Death is nothing terrible after all. It may mean something even more wonderful than life. It cannot possibly mean anything worse to a good soldier. . . . Success in life means doing that thing than which nothing else conceivable seems more noble or satisfying or remunerative, and this enviable state I can truly say I enjoy, for had I the choice, I would be nowhere else in the world than where I am."[1]
From him as from Grenfell this sentiment comes inevitably; and he was no soldier by profession, but, in so far as he had chosen any, a poet. At first sight they seem twin natures in ardour, in frankness, in courage, in devotion; only gradually can the spirit become reconciled to admitting an immense difference.
The temptation is to apply here the common English prejudice as to where the American fails. But this would be uncritical, for exceptional natures least conform to
- ↑ Poems by Alan Seeger. Introduction by W. Archer. Constable & Co. Quotations by permission of C. L. Seeger, Esq., and Messrs Constable.
