John Allan Wyeth (poet)
John Allan Wyeth was an American World War I veteran, poet, composer, and painter. Wyeth wrote poetry from an early age. After World War I, he lived in Europe, mixed with other members of the Lost Generation, and became known as a war poet.
According to Bradley J. Omanson and Dana Gioia, who rescued Wyeth's poetry from obscurity during the early 21st century, Wyeth is the only American poet of the Great War who can withstand comparison to British war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.
Early life
John Allan Wyeth was born on October 24, 1894 in New York City. His father, also named John Allan Wyeth, was a Confederate veteran of the American Civil War from Guntersville, Alabama. The elder Wyeth had served under the command of Gen. John Hunt Morgan before being captured by the Union Army in 1862. He spent the rest of the war as a POW at Camp Morton, near Indianapolis, and, when he returned to Alabama, Wyeth was so emaciated that his own mother did not recognize him. After studying medicine at the University of Louisville, Wyeth pursued his education in Europe and became, in later life, a very prominent New York City surgeon.Wyeth's mother, Florence Nightingale Sims, was the daughter of South Carolina native and pioneering surgeon J. Marion Sims. Wyeth's brother, Marion Sims Wyeth, became an architect and designed many mansions in Florida.
In a 2020 article about Wyeth in St Austin Review, Gioia writes that the future poet was "raised in a cultured family" and grew up attending the Episcopal Church.
Wyeth was educated at the Lawrenceville School, a Presbyterian boarding school in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. During his time at Lawrenceville, Wyeth was president of the drama club and the class poet. He published his work extensively in the Lawrenceville Literary Magazine and, in 1908, a play by the 13-year old Wyeth was performed for a charity benefit.
Wyeth began attending Princeton University in 1911. He was a member of the Princeton Charter Club. He studied mostly literature and the Greek, Latin, French, German, and Italian languages. He was an average student, but impressed his professors with his extensive knowledge of literature and his personal charm. Wyeth contributed to the Nassau Literary Magazine and was a member of the Class Ode Committee.
Wyeth's friends at Princeton included Edmund Wilson and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Wyeth had no roommate at Princeton, which was unusual at the time. His friend Edmund Wilson later described Wyeth as "the only aesthete of the Class of 1915." According to Gioia, who interviewed Wyeth's surviving relatives, "aesthete" is "almost certainly" a codeword for homosexual.
Wyeth graduated from Princeton in 1915. The yearbook described him as, "Undedecided about his future occupation."
After his graduation, Wyeth taught French in a high school in Mesa, Arizona for a year, then returned to Princeton, where he intended to pursue graduate school and become a professor of Romance languages. However, Wyeth only completed his Master's.
In the wake of America's entry into World War I, Wyeth's education was disrupted.
The Great War
On December 28, 1917, Wyeth enlisted in the United States Army as a Second Lieutenant in the 33rd U.S. Infantry Division. His fluency in French caused him to be assigned to the Interpreter's Corps at Division HQ. After training at Camp Logan in Houston, Texas, Lieut. Wyeth was transferred to Camp Upton in New York City. On May 16, 1918, his Division moved to Hoboken, New Jersey, where he boarded the USS Mount Vernon to join the American Expeditionary Forces in France.On the night of August 8–9, 1918, as Doughboys from the 33rd U.S. Division were joining the Allied offensive during the Battle of Amiens, Wyeth and Lieut. Thomas J. Cochrane were assigned to deliver sealed orders from Division HQ at Molliens-au-Bois to the Field Headquarters of all three Batallions engaged in the attack. The location of each Batallion was unknown, but they were believed to be along the northern bank of the Somme River, near the village of Sailly-le-Sec. Wyeth would later describe the mission in detail in his six interlinked "Chipilly Ridge sonnets."
On the afternoon of September 14, 1918, while the men of the 33rd U.S. Division were stationed at Fromereville near Verdun, Wyeth was taking a shower with a group of bickering Doughboys when he heard the cry, "Air Raid!" Like every other bather, Wyeth ran, naked and covered with soap, into the village square. There, he watched as a Fokker D VII, flown by Unteroffizier Hans Heinrich Marwede from Jasta 67's aerodrome at Marville, began an attack against three French observation balloons. With the first balloon already in flames, Marwede flew towards the other two, which were right to the West. Before Marwede's Fokker was within firing range, the French artillery observer, 2nd Lieutenant Henri Bovet, jumped from his balloon's basket and opened his parachute. Marwede sent his Fokker into a steep dive and set Bovet's parachute on fire with tracer bullets. After nearly grazing the roof of the bathhouse, Marwede pulled his Fokker out of its dive and set both of the remaining balloons on fire. Lieut. Wyeth later described Marwede's victory in his sonnet Fromereville: The War in Heaven.
Lost Generation
After the Armistice, Wyeth served with the US Third Army during the Allied Occupation of the Rhineland. He was discharged from the United States Army on October 23, 1919.Wyeth delayed his return to Princeton until the following year by claiming, "a percentage of disability," that required recuperating at his older brother's home in Palm Beach, Florida. Wyeth returned to Princeton for the January term, but soon left after winning a travelling fellowship to study in Liège, Belgium. By 1923, Wyeth had finished his oral exams in both French and German.
In April 1926, Wyeth wrote to Princeton and applied to continue his doctoral studies. But his resolve proved shortlived.
Poet
In September 1926, Wyeth wrote again to Princeton from Rapallo, Italy, and said that he wished to drop his academic studies. He explained, "I have always desired above all things to try my hand at literature." He added that he believed, "that whatever literary talent I might come to possess could be brought into play in response to a complete whole-hearted devotion to literary aims."Wyeth remained in Rapallo until 1932. Although not much is known for certain, it is known that he shared a household there with his sister Florence Sims MacLean, his brother in law Alan MacLean, and his niece Jane Marion MacLean. It is also known that the Wyeth family's circle of friends in Rapallo included Max Beerbohm, Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, and Gerhard Hauptmann.
Both Dana Gioia and B.J. Omanson believe that it was during Wyeth's years in Rapallo and under the influence of Ezra Pound's poetic philosophies of Modernism and Imagism that Wyeth wrote the sonnets which comprise his only poetry collection.
Wyeth's book of poems, a sonnet sequence entitled This Man’s Army: A War in Fifty-Odd Sonnets, was published in 1928. Wyeth's sonnets are in a mixture of Iambic Pentameter and the, "loose five stress most commonly used in popular spoken verse." Wyeth's sonnets also use a rhyme scheme, which is unique in the 700-year history of the sonnet form. They also mix Doughboy slang with words and phrases from both French and German.
According to B.J. Omanson, every event described in Wyeth's sonnets, which tell the story of his war service from receiving orders at Camp Upton to embark on a troop transport bound for France to his removal from combat during the 1918 flu pandemic, can be verified from other sources. Even the way Wyeth describes the weather is completely accurate.
According to Gioia, "One assumes - and in the absence of documentary evidence this can remain only an assumption - that the young Wyeth kept a detailed journal during the war that later served as the basis of his book."
This Man's Army was favorably reviewed in Poetry in December 1932.
According to Dana Gioia, however, the fact that Wyeth's collection was published so soon before the 1929 Stock Market Crash and the beginning of the Great Depression meant that This Man's Army soon slid into obscurity. Wyeth never published another book of poems and, barring the rediscovery of unpublished manuscripts by his family, This Man's Army will likely remain his sole contribution to American poetry.
Artist
In May 1932, Wyeth had a chance encounter with Scottish painter Duncan Grant, who was a member of the Bloomsbury Group, at Cassis-sur-Mer on the French Riviera. Grant urged Wyeth to study painting at the Académie Moderne in Paris and provided him with a letter of introduction to French artist Jean Marchand. Wyeth immediately returned to Rapallo, settled his affairs, and moved to Paris.According to B.J. Omanson, "From 1932 to 1938, Wyeth appears to have travelled an annual circuit around Europe which allowed him to indulge his new-found passion for landscape painting. He spent each winter and spring in Paris at the Académie Moderne, studying painting under Jean Marchand, then spent the summer at Berchtesgaden in Bavaria and, finally, the autumn at the Schule Schloss Salem on the grounds of the old Cistercian monastery north of Salem. Also, at some time during each of these yearly circuits, Wyeth found time to visit Cyprus and Greece for more painting."
At the time of Wyeth's visits to Germany, Schule Schloss Salem was one the main training centers for the Hitler Youth. Also, Berchtesgaden was a regular hangout for both members of the Nazi elite and the British Royal Family. B.J. Omanson therefore suspects that Wyeth, who had been trained as a military intelligence officer during World War I, may have been spying on Nazi Germany for American or British Intelligence.
Stateside
After six years of living as an itinerant artist in Europe, Wyeth returned to New York City aboard the U.S.S. President Harding in July 1938.In 1939, Wyeth's paintings were exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and the Frank Rehn Gallery in New York City.
During World War II, Wyeth served in the United States Coast Guard. B.J. Omanson suspects, however, that Wyeth may have continued to work in the intelligence field.
By the early 1950s, Wyeth had been received into the Roman Catholic Church. Despite what he terms the, "ubiquitous presence of French Catholicism," in Wyeth's war poetry, Dana Gioia acknowledges that, "The journey must have been complicated. Wyeth was almost certainly gay, although no documentation survives concerning his sexual orientation. What we do know is that by late middle age, he was a serious Catholic. His personal journey resembles that of another war poet, Siegfried Sassoon, who was a homosexual in his early years, but eventually married and converted to Catholicism. Sassoon's biography is lavishly documented; Wyeth's is not. We will probably never know the details of his inner life."
During the 1970s, Wyeth was part of "a small circle of Rhode Island Catholic artists and intellectuals."
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According to Dana Gioia, "In his later years he composed sacred music. When his Missa Prima was premiered in 1974 by a 65-voice choir for the centenary of St. Edward's Church in Providence, Rhode Island, Wyeth told the Providence Journal-Bulletin that he had begun the work twenty years earlier."
The Princeton alumni organization consistently failed to locate Wyeth and eventually dropped him from the 1915 Class roll, "by mutual consent."
Toward the end of his life he lived with his niece, poet Jane Marion McLean in Princeton, New Jersey.
Death and burial
In 1979, Wyeth moved into a family house in Skillman, New Jersey. He died there, at the age of 86, on May 11, 1981. He was buried at the Blawenburg Reformed Church Cemetery in Blawenburg, New Jersey. According to Dana Gioia, "Neither of the two Princeton obituaries mentions his poetry." Also according to Gioia, Wyeth, "died a committed Catholic."In 2019, B.J. Omanson wrote, "John Allan Wyeth was a reticent man, not given to revealing his past, even to his family. But I suspect there were hidden depths to him which had not escaped his family's notice.
"When Dana Gioia first approached the Wyeth family in 2008 to learn more about their 'Uncle John', and to request permission to reprint his sonnets, they confessed that -- as well as they had known him -- they had no idea that he had ever published a book of poems. But it didn't surprise them.
"And when, two years ago, I first raised the possibility that their great-uncle might have been a spy in Nazi Germany between the wars -- once again, none of them seemed all that surprised. 'I always had my suspicions,' said one of them."
Rediscovery
Bradley J. Omanson
During the early 1990s, World War I poetry enthusiast Bradley J. Omanson found a copy of This Man's Army inside a used bookstore in Morgantown, West Virginia. He later wrote that the book was "a sizable collection of individual poems, and they were all located in France, during the war, with place names for titles and in chronological order. No other book of war poetry I could think of employed such a systematic and documentary arrangement. It was laid out like a soldier's diary. I scanned the list of French towns and place names, and as soon as I saw Chipilly Ridge I guessed that the poet had been with the American 33rd Division. Later investigation would bear this out."Omanson further recalled, "Wyeth's sequence... was over fifty sonnets long and, reading through just a few of them at random, indicated that not only were they highly skilled,but unusually innovative as well. What was most exciting was that they were written, not in an elevated, formal tone, but in a cool, concise, dispassionate voice, spiced with slangy soldiers' dialogue, French villagers' patois, and filled with as many small particulars of life as any of the finest soldier-diaries I had read. I immediately paid for the book and took it home and began researching."
As Google did not yet exist, Omanson went to his local university library and began researching. While searching through literary magazines from the interwar period, he found a few positive reviews of This Man's Army, but, to Omanson's frustration, the reviews revealed nothing about Wyeth's life or identity. After finding the 1945 anthology Poet Physicians, Omanson saw that a few of Wyeth's war poems were included and were mistakenly credited to his father, who was described as a Confederate veteran of the American Civil War. It seemed unbelievable, but the anthology's editor, Mary Lou McDonough, was described as the wife of Captain Stephen McDonough of the Surgeon General's Office in Washington, D.C.. Therefore, Omanson concluded that his source was "unimpeachable." He therefore concluded that the elder Wyeth had returned to active service during World War I and had served in France. To ease Omanson's scepticism, several of his contacts among World War I enthusiasts online showed him other examples of Civil War veterans who had also served during the Great War.
Omanson continues, "I contacted anyone I could find on the web who was associated with WWI poetry, sending them examples of Wyeth's war sonnets, but almost no one responded. While the military and social historians of the war were interested, the literary historians were asleep. It was as though the existing solar system of WWI poetry was such a settled affair that no one would entertain the possibility of a new planet. Not even the poems themselves seemed to spark any interest."
Dana Gioia
The only expert in World War I poetry who did express interest in Wyeth was Dana Gioia, with whom Omanson had already been corresponding about the New Formalist Movement within American poetry.In 1994, Omanson sent Gioia a copy of This Man's Army and asked for his opinion.
Gioia recalls, "I often receive copies of little-known or neglected books sent by people soliciting my advocacy for what they believe are worthy causes. Most forgotten books, however, do not merit renewed critical attention. Initially skeptical, I read This Man's Army with growing interest and excitement. It was not only a fine book but a unique one in American poetry. I was also confident that Wyeth was known to scholars of World War I poetry. Few literary areas have been so intensely studied. It seemed unlikely that scholars would have missed such a conspicuously excellent volume. Here I was mistaken."
Although he never addressed his doubts to Omanson at the time, Gioia writes, "I was also sure that Omanson was mistaken about the identity of the author. This Man's Army was not an old man's work. The elder Wyeth must have had a son and a namesake."
Republication
In October 2008, a new edition of "This Man's Army," with a biographical and interpretive introduction by Dana Gioia, and annotations by BJ Omanson, was re-published by the University of South Carolina Press, as part of Matthew Bruccoli's Great War Series of Lost Literary Classics of World War I.In response to the publication, British poet and literary critic Jon Stallworthy, the editor of The Oxford Book of War Poetry and the biographer of Wilfred Owen, wrote, "At long last, marking the ninetieth anniversary of the Armistice, an American poet takes his place in the front rank of the War Poet's parade."
Works
On To Paris.a sleep like sickness in the rattling train.
Men's bodies joggle on the opposite seat
and tired greasy faces half awake
stir restlessly and breathe a stagnant sigh.
The stale air thickens on the grimy pane
reeking of musty smoke and woolly feet.
Versailles—a bridge of shadow on a lake
dawn-blue and pale, the color of the sky.
Paris at last!--and a great joy like pain
in my heart. We scuffle down the corridor.
"Lieutenant."
"Sir."
"In half an hour we meet
at another station—your orders are to take
these men by subway to the Gare du Nord."''