Robert Hedin, ed., Old Glory: American War Poems from the Revolutionary War to the War on Terrorism. Foreword by Walter Cronkite. New York, Persea Books, 2004. Pp. xxviii + 370, $22.50 pb.

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When Walter Cronkite claims "the gift of telling what war is really like has been bestowed upon the poets," he's being gracious. That poets communicate something about war doesn't mean they have a special capability for knowing, never mind telling, "what war is really like." Even so, war experience may be realized in various ways, including by non-combatants. I think of James Tate's "The Lost Pilot," a WW II poem about his father who, having been lost in action over Germany, has become ageless—an orbiting ebony icon—even as his co-pilot survives with a face turned to "corn mush," his gunner with blindness, and his son the poet feeling as though he's "the residue of a stranger's life." This fine, unpretending poem does not appear in Old Glory . . . overlooked, apparently, as there's no categorical reason to exclude it.

Carolyn Forche's "The Colonel" is quite another matter. A prose poem, it registers her encounter with a Salvadoran officer who after dinner dumps a bag of dried ears on the table, an in-your-face directed at the poet—a political journalist working with Amnesty International—saying "something for your poetry, no?" And, "tell your people they can go fuck themselves." This poem and its message are also missing. But unlike Tate's lost pilot, Forche's colonel had to be excluded, categorically, because she's writing from a war that passes below the radar of Old Glory. That the Salvadoran war was underwritten by the US does not qualify it for this anthology, which acknowledges only twelve US wars, from the War for Independence, here called Revolutionary War, to what is called (contrary to all evidence) the "War On Terrorism." A de facto canonical framework privileges certain kinds of war while passing over others. In effect the war categories police the selection process.

War is not a single immutable category, no more than peace is. To some extent Hedin understands this. His introduction summarizes, roughly, the shifts from war to war and the range of poetic responses to them. He notes the power and variety of Civil War poetry as over against his sense that "no verse of any real value has been produced by" the Gulf War of 1990-1991 or the "War on Terrorism." That may be so, but it's difficult to tell whether the fault lies with the conception and editing of this anthology, with the poets themselves, or with the way our experience of these wars has been mediated. Perhaps all of the above. Freelance photographers were banned from the Gulf War, which was projected largely in abstracted video images provided by the Department of Defense. Then again, to get at that war it might have taken more analytical acumen than is available in the current pool of American poetry. We don't know. We do however know that the reprise of the Gulf War, the invasion of Iraq, was shown from before the beginning to be baldly corporate, with no credible redeeming idealism—a configuration that self-oriented American poetry, with its aversion to historical and socio-political realities, is ill-equipped to deal with. At least one poet, Albert Goldbarth, is deeply troubled—less by the war, as wars are endemic—than by the disjuncture between the reality of the war and the benign trivia his friends are lavishing their lives and their poetry on.

Hedin speculates the problem is that "the poems of this period are largely an expression of watching." Judging from this anthology, which may not be representative of current war poetry, the cause is not that poets are watching but that they're not seeing. There is no Highway of Death in the Gulf War poems, but then neither was there in the DoD briefings. Nor are there tortures, bombed hospitals, families incinerated in cars or collective punishments in Old Glory poetry that addresses the wars of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In truth, "watching" or witnessing has never precluded a powerful war poetry. One of the more sobering Civil War poems, "My Triumph Lasted Till the Drums," was written by Emily Dickinson, a non-combatant who wrote too big, too tough-minded, too unfazed to come up short on any occasion.

As to the purely poetic inadequacy of US responses to the current war, there's another lesson to be learned from Emily Dickinson. Despite declared political values, most American poets have trained themselves as poets not to see, never mind deal with, the historical, social and political realities that inform and condition everyone's existence including their own. The immaturity induced by compartmentalization, the constriction of vision and context, disables the poetry. Having put on blinders, yet faced now with significant social, moral and spiritual crises, that poetry can only twist its head every whichway, trying desperately and too late to make out what is happening all around it. Emily Dickinson's genius is that her poetry did not rule out anything. (Internally even the dashes enable flexibility, allowing her to break down syntactic lock-ups.) Huge as the Civil War was, as a poet she could rise to meet it. It's a cliché that one could frequent flier the globe yet live in a smaller world than she did in 19th century Amherst—but the aesthetic implications of that commonplace have still not been absorbed into the mainstream of contemporary American poetry.

The Gulf War selection, as befits that under-reported cruise missile cum bombing blitz, is demoralizing--the poems by turn abstracted, clever, callow, ponderous. One undoes itself in a fit of apocalyptic helplessness. Two poems seem actually listless. They make one feel bad about poetry. The one poem not rocked back on its heels is an elaborately set up, but conceptually decisive excerpt from William Heyen's "Ribbons: The Gulf War." Perhaps the poets were disarmed by the mythification of high-tech warfare whereby, as Andrew J. Bacevich describes it, "technology-as-panacea . . . knocked away much of the accumulated blood-rust sullying war's reputation." What is a poet to do with virtual surgical strikes delivered out of and into a media void?

Then again, during the Gulf War more poets than usual kept silent. It's no secret that from then on, and even moreso during the unopposed War on the Balkans (a war which does not exist in this anthology), many who might have raised their voices in the past now seemed to accept US military intervention as being humanitarian: relieving the ethnically cleansed, or maybe easing the plight of women. NOW, for instance, seemed to support the invasion of Afghanistan. In effect there's an assumption, as Michael Ignatieff the Harvard human rights advocate put it (approvingly), that "empire has become a precondition for democracy." To that extent it has also been a precondition for poetic silence. Not out of poetic bad faith, but as the fallout of a historically cultivated ignorance. There's nothing new about imperial power operating under high moral cover only to pull off a classic bait-&-switch. In the late 19th century King Leopold II of Belgium invaded the Congo to liberate the Congolese from Arab slave traders. Which he did. But only to chain them to his own rubber plantations. And steal their art! A poetry that can't handle reality of that order is unlikely to get a purchase on current versions of same.

As if waking from a long sleep, a large number of poems have been written against the war on Iraq. But they exert little presence, even poetically. Often it seems the world's grit had to take a bath before it could qualify for poetry—the grit being historical, political, ideological. Even the denunciations seem driven not by hope that something may come of them, but to fill in a moral protocol. The "War On Terrorism" does turn up a few generalized attempts to rally resistance, mounted by those who remember such things (Ferlinghetti and Robert Bly), though Bly's strikes an oddly pleading note. It's disconcerting, especially to one who remembers his all-out "The Teeth-Mother Naked At Last," a Vietnam War salvo which, perhaps for reasons of length, does not appear in this anthology. But it should have, if only as a reminder of what daemonic indignation sounds like.

Individual shortcomings only throw into relief the more serious systemic consequences of Old Glory's war categories. Hedin seems not to consider the ideological preconditions, with their historic and aesthetic implications, that govern his own working assumptions about what constitutes a war. The twelve US wars that provide the framework for this anthology have no common basis except in being acknowledged as wars. The Revolutionary War was a war for independence. One was a colonizing, anti-insurrectionary, ethnic cleansing war (Indian Wars), one a land grab (Mexican-American War), and one flat out imperial (Spanish-American War). Two were declared wars in accord with the US Constitution (World Wars I & II). The war on the Korean peninsula was not admitted to be a US war but a "UN police action." God knows what Vietnam was: an imperial adventure lurching into all-out bloody breakdown that finally, by virtue of the sheer numbers of casualties and graphic photos, plus a staged (non-existent) incident in the Gulf of Tonkin, became a semi-official US war—the end marked by video footage of a helicopter lifting off from the roof of the US embassy in Saigon, with stragglers clinging to the runners.

After the Vietnam War there is a marked decline in the quality of US war poetry. For whatever reasons—some already mentioned, plus the lack of mass political movement, the evaporation of principled progressive politics, the retreat into pockets of identity or tribal politics, the murkier origins and edges of post Vietnam wars in conjunction with the clampdown on news coverage that followed from Vietnam, or even the academic poetic fashion of obscuring causality by disheveling the links between cause and effect, and between language and referent (though never managing to distress the link between language and reality to the extent that Old Glory's president has)—the bottom seems to have fallen out. But is that the whole story?

Old Glory's war categories, an ideology unto themselves, are the spectre that is haunting this anthology. In one revealing case, where the category as such does not require that a particular poem be excluded, the category title does. Amiri Baraka's "Somebody Blew Up America" is more pointed, historically, than any poem in the "War On Terrorism." It alone challenges outright the claim that the current war is a war on terrorism. Baraka names names and alludes to certifiable 9-11 details suppressed in mainstream and academic media. And does so almost entirely by positing, in the seemingly gratuitous disaster movie unreality of 9-11, real toad-like questions in a language that will not qualify for anyone's fantasy of respectable discourse. One might call it theatrically, fiendishly clever: the blowing up of the WTC not as an event-in-itself, but an ignition event for the blowing up of America (of civil rights, human rights, constitutional rights in general, habeas corpus, separation of military from police, insulation of criminal law system from that of military law, Geneva Convention, Nuremburg precedent, legal constraints on torture, etc.). It may be the only "War On Terrorism' poem attacked by high profile politicians and guardians of culture. Yet it does not appear in this anthology. Not because it opposes the "war on terrorism"—except for one poem of military family resignation, no poem goes along with this war--but that it sinks its teeth too sharply into immediate and longstanding US political realities. The poem is so crude as literally to engage the war and its agendas. Which makes its absence the more telling.

Imagine an Old Glory anthology that had a category called "Dirty Wars." Or "School of The Americas Wars" (now called Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation), to admit poetry that responds to the ceaseless crosscurrents of US covert and not-so-covert bombings, blockades and killings carried out by proxy death squads as well as by CIA mercenaries and US special forces. From 1989, Operation Just Cause in Panama, to 2003, Operation Iraqi Freedom, a mere fourteen years, there have been nine major military interventions (not counting Clinton's fitful missile attacks, the US special and mercenary forces in Colombia, etc.). During the Central American wars such operations were strategized as "low-intensity warfare," what Robert Lowell called "small wars," though in life no war is small or low-intensity, neither to those behind the gun nor those under it.

There are other bodies of English language poetry, unlike any in this anthology, generated by such wars: the US Contra War against Nicaragua, the US-driven war in El Salvador, and the US sponsored, planned and funded overthrow of the Unidad Popular government of Chile. (I do not mention the extraordinary body of Spanish language poetry because, excepting three Sioux pieces, this anthology is restricted to US poets writing in English.) Some interventions, such as that in Honduras or Haiti, have gotten little or no poetic notice here. But by not admitting to such wars, if only in worst cases to mark the poetic silence surrounding them, we're missing valuable information about the complex, ambiguous role of "American poetry" vis-a-vis US wars. Not war in general—an invitation to glibness—but wars in particular.

The only indication that anything other has been going on is the epigraph to Adrienne Rich's poem about a (generic) besieged school in "The School Among The Ruins": Beirut.Baghdad.Sarajevo.Bethlehem.Kabul. Not of course here. Which, in this anthology, reads like a secret code. Beirut? Sarajevo? Bethlehem? Hello? What's that all about? "The School Among The Ruins" is among the minority of post Vietnam War poems that speak for the innocent non-American victims of Old Glory, which in our time has given more misery than it has gotten. But then we expect no less of Rich who is unusual in that as a poet she has lived 'in the world' habitually, not just for this or that occasion. The "War On Terrorism" also has Billy Collins' "The Names," which seizes a populist moment by tolling the movingly polyglot names, publicly all that remains of them, left by victims of 9-11. Though not included in this anthology, it might have been instructive to see "The Names" alongside Martin Espada's "Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100," which is less ecumenical but socially more precise. Also, being more powerfully imagined, "Alabanza" is less reliant on the immediate overflow of post 9-11 sentiment.

Is it foolish to imagine, someday, an anthology of war poems as attentive to the savaged as to the savagers? Regardless of their languages and nationalities?

The three Melville poems in Old Glory provide a splendid, if rare, example of poetry that cuts through symptoms into causes. Melville not only grasps that the Civil War is an unprecedented industrial war, a mechanized war, but finds a language to articulate it. Hedin quotes from "A Utilitarian View of the Monitor's Fight," where "beyond the strife of fleets heroic"

     Deadlier, closer, calm 'mid storm;
     No passion, all went on by crank,
                          Pivot, and screw,
         And calculations of caloric.

Mocking the obsolete rhetoric "of fleets heroic," downshifting in rhyme and rhythm to "calculations of caloric," Melville caught the feel of this new antiheroic and therefore 'antipoetic' warfare—in which, he says (echoing Milton's dismissal of rhyme as "the invention of a barbarous age," a form of "modern bondage") there's no place for "rhyme's barbaric cymbal." Hedin cites Melville and Whitman as two Civil War poets who could "break with the past and . . . introduce a poetic sensibility that bordered on the modern." No one need speak for Whitman, who says it all. But it's tempting to note that Melville is still a more modern poet than most modern poets--his tenor very nearly the opposite of the non-denominational piety and disingenuous innocence that gets along by taking the pressure off reality, in effect underestimating it and so lowering poetic as well as intellectual standards.

Finally an anthology of American war poetry from the War for Independence to the present may be too vast and problematic a project for any one editor, however accomplished or assiduous. To discover the extent of existing materials, sorting through the ideological pitfalls, demands a major collective research effort, including into theoretical questions. Given the restrictions of his war categories, Hedin's search may be as comprehensive as could be managed. Still, the criteria governing individual selections are hardly transparent. What is sufficient for inclusion? That the work be 'authentic?' Is merely symptomatic work OK? How decisive a criterion is literary quality? Or a work's place in cultural history? A representative selection of war poetry during the past sixty years would have been drawn, as well, from the Dirty Wars that mark the ever lurking baseline of Old Glory's war business. The sheer poetic value of acknowledging such wars would be incalculable, perhaps spiking a reconsideration of canonical war poetry hierarchies. The likes of Bob Kaufman's refreshingly uncoy "War Memoir: Jazz, Don't Listen To it At Your Own Risk" might seem less marginal, more definitive of what could be US poetry's historically specific gravity.

At one point in Forche's poem about the Salvadoran colonel, she breaks in on herself: "There's no other way to say this." A defensive sentence, and troubling. She feels the need to explain, against the grain of our poetic assumptions, that she can only relate this reality in the terms of that reality: "He spilled many ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves." Words that don't slide off their subject, nor play at it, nor inflate it. But isn't that the least poetry should do, especially war poetry?

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Many poems in Old Glory are from what used to be called the home front: Elizabeth Bishop's characteristically vivid "Roosters," or Allen Tate's "Ode to the Confederate Dead," included seemingly for the record. The problem is not that Tate wrote the poem sixty years after its war—other poems were written even longer after the fact--nor that it puts an absolving spin on the armies of the slaveholders, but that it was cadaverous at conception. It doesn't age, just deteriorates over time, growing only patchier in the bombast of its own evasions. Shouldn't there be a mercy rule for famous bad poems, if only to make room for something less self-deluded? It needn't be as lively and electric as a fragment from Archilochos, but something that at least speaks. By contrast with Tate's "Ode," Robert Lowell's "For the Union Dead," though already settling into the niche of a period he himself did much to define, and writ yet further after the fact, nonetheless throbs with the presence of a still live-issued Civil War.

In any anthology as overreaching as this one, eligible poems are bound to slip through the cracks. Yet some absences are more consequential than others. There are good, honest poems in the "Vietnam War" section, and not one has the nuance, the aesthetic and human integrity (one a function of the other), of those in Doug Anderson's The Moon Reflected Fire--its four sections elaborated in context not with that war only, but revived in detail through Goya, through Homer, and on into the trauma that is never really done with. For anyone who wants to know how far and deep a specifically American war poetry can reach, with no posturing, this is a book to look for.

Each person will have her or his own poems to add. Not necessary ones, but personal favorites. In the World War II section one such MIA is the melancholy 'victory' disembarkation of Alfred Hayes' "The City of Beggars." Edna St Vincent Millay's verse narrative, The Murder of Lidice, was undoubtedly too long for inclusion, and poetically naive—which is too bad, in this era of Jenin and Falluja, as hers is a salutary outcry from a time when the US still considered collective punishment a war crime. There might also have been something from the Pisan Cantos—a perspective, like it or not, that few American poets are in a position to speak from. What was surprising, to me, is that after all these years the strongest World War I poem by an American is the selection from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley ("These fought in any case"). Its unmuddled power still amazes.

For the record, early on the poems by Philip Freneau and Emerson stand out. Dated language notwithstanding, they're so direct and uncompromised they still feel fresh. Others are new to me, such as Elizabeth Akers Allen's nicely realized Civil War poem, "In The Defences." Still others, unexpected: Kenneth Koch's "To World War Two," Charles Simic's quiet "Prodigy," and Edward Field's "World War II." And, no surprise from that least starry-eyed of American poets, Alan Dugan's "Portrait from the Infantry." A real find, for me, was Daniel Berrigan's searing, feisty, almost shocking in the context of today's relatively calculated poetries, "You Could Make A Song of It, A Dirge of It, A Heartbreaker of It." We could have a drink on that one, which was written from the federal prison at Danbury. The poems one expects to find—Hecht's "More Light! More Light!"—are also here, mostly undiminished.

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This review originally appeared in North Dakota Quarterly Vol 72 No 3 Summer 2005.