Alan Seeger The Romantic Poet Of Ww1

Alan Seeger, the Romantic Poet of WWI

During the first world war, a few soldiers like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon wrote poems about the war front and the experiences they had endured, aside from one who also lived through the experience and was unfazed by it when writing his poems, Alan Seeger was an American who fought in the French Foreign Legion and wrote many poems that romanticized it. Even though his experience was just as bad as Wilfred’s and Siegfried's, his poems helped describe what it was like to be on the frontlines when the United States, at the time, had not joined the war. Alan Seeger's romanticized poems about WWI reflected his different, more chivalrous values compared to the materialism and sophistication of the 1910s.

Alan Seeger was born in Staten Island, NY, in 1888 (Poetry Foundation) and later moved with his family to Mexico when he was 10 because his father invested in a business. Seeger only stayed for four years. When he and his brother moved back to New York in 1902 to attend high school there (Friedman), he graduated high school in 1906 and attended the University of Harvard. During his first couple years at Harvard, Seeger would stay with his books and exclude himself from any social events, something he later regretted. In his diary, he stated that "My life during those years was intellectual to the exclusion of almost everything else. I shut myself off completely from the life of the university. I felt no need of comradeship." (Friedman) In a place where partying and socializing are the norm, Seeger was only there to learn. But during his final years at Harvard, he picked up on being more social, as any young person would in college. He would also write for the Harvard Monthly paper, Seeger graduated from Harvard University in 1910. That same year, Seeger moved to Greenwich, New York, where he’d lived a Bohemian lifestyle, writing poems and sharing a room with another Harvard student, John Reed, who later was a supporter of the Communist Revolution and became famous for his book Ten Days that Shook the World. But living in Greenwich did not last very long. Wanting to explore the world and also believing

The sentimental and romantic nature of Seeger's poems is a helpful reminder that we can't solve problems effectively unless we think that they are just and appropriate. The vast majority of military volunteers, like Seeger, don't enlist for no reason at all. Soldiers are motivated to fight by a variety of things, including patriotism, pride, bravery, and courage, all of which apply to Seeger's case. Even if disappointment eventually sets in, we shouldn't let it influence how we perceive combat in general. ("Dead on the 4th of July: Poet Alan Seeger.") In a time when most were in the trenches, hoping not to get blown to pieces by an artillery shell, Alan Seeger knew he was risking his life, but it was pride and all those other things that had made him decide he needed to enlist in the Legion, to do and fight for something he loved. In the 1910's, much of Seeger's philosophy on the world was very old school, still believing that chivalry and fighting for pride were no longer the norm for soldiers in world war one, as a friend of Seegers described it, stating that "this style of warfare…Instead of bringing out all that is noble in a man, it brings out only his worse self—meanness, greed and ill temper. We are not, in fact, leading the life of men at all, but that of animals, living in holes in the ground and only showing our