La "pace separata" del poeta americano

American poets followed closely the course of WW1 as the US moved from neutrality to intervention. In November 1914, Poetry Magazine ran a special War Issue, featuring a good number of women writers, and strongly pacifist in tone. The poets associated with Chicago, Sandburg and Lindsay, included significant poems about the war in their inaugural collections, Chicago Poems (1915) and The Congo and Other Poems (1914). These early statements condemn war in general and the leaders who have started it. Things change in later collections, as the US becomes a participant. Pound and Eliot produced some of their central works in the war years and just after. Pound criticized the Poetry war number and expressed his "separate peace" in Homage to Sextus Propertius, though he was to become more indignant and address WW1 head-on in Mauberley and The Cantos, with uneven results. Eliot drew from WW1 a sense of the decline of civilization, which he expressed first in Gerontion and then in The Waste Land. Stevens took a more general position in Lettres d’un Soldat, a sequence of poems which he later removed from their wartime context; it includes the well-known epitaph The Death of a Soldier. Taking the longer view, Stevens can still claim an ideal nobility for the soldier’s death. In this her differs, at least apparently, from Hemingway, who wrote prose sketches and a few poems about life at war, denouncing all rhetoric. Frost scarcely noticed the war in his published verse, except for an elegy for his poet friend Edward Thomas, which takes a personal position and eschews all generalizations. Unlike their British contemporaries, American poets treated the war always from an individual perspective and in experimental forms, as it were from a distance, and out of this confrontation produced some of their signature works, that is, much of the writing by which they and WW1 are remembered.