'An American soldier-poet’: Alan Seeger and war culture in the United States, 1914-1918', First World War Studies 1:1(March 2012), pp. 15-35.

Miller, Alisa 'An American soldier-poet’: Alan Seeger and war culture in the United States, 1914-1918', First World War Studies 1:1(March 2012), pp. 15-35.

Abstract

This article considers the ways in which the myth of the poet-soldier crossed national boundaries, allowing pro-interventionist Americans to mould public opinion during the First World War. The article engages with dialogues around propaganda (Brett, Coben), comparative urban and national war cultures and mobilisations (Winter, Robert) as well as the emergence of international ‘cultural markets’ (Sassoon). It considers how in particular the New York Times deployed the poet Alan Seeger as a means of generating unofficial, ‘gentle’ propaganda in the years leading up to the American declaration of war in 1917. The article was commissioned for the inaugural edition of the interdisciplinary journal First World War Studies, complementing work contributed by Prof Hew Strachan (All Souls College, Oxford) and Dr Kaushik Roy (PRIO Norway / Jadavpur University, Kolkata), and followed on from Miller’s work as a co-organiser of the international conference ‘Other Combatants, Other Fronts: Competing Histories of the First World War’ convened at the Imperial War Museum (09.2009). The American Friends, Christ Church, Oxford funded periods of archival research at the University of Birmingham Special Collections, the Houghton Library, Harvard University and at the House of Lords Archive. As part of the team developing the First World War Poetry Digital Archive supported by JISC, Miller was also able to undertake primary research at the Berg Collection, New York Public Library. She was invited to present a draft of the article at the international conference ‘From the trenches to Versailles: War and Memory (1914 -1919)’ convened at the Institute of Contemporary History, New University of Lisbon (06.2009). The rigour of the article is demonstrated in the detailed analysis of private papers, ephemera, poetry and newspaper articles, woven together to build up a picture of the particular war culture that developed in the United States. It also draws on a wide range of secondary material to identify the artistic, political and poetic circumstances that shaped Seeger into an emblem, frequently called upon to illustrate the close cultural and, ultimately, political ties between the nation and its European allies.

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