John Allan Wyeth (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."[11]

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.[12]

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.[12][13]

Wyeth's book of poems, a sonnet sequence entitled This Man’s Army: A War in Fifty-Odd Sonnets, was published in 1928.[1] 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 (ABCDABCDABECDE), which is unique in the 700-year history of the sonnet form.[4] 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."[14]

This Man's Army was favorably reviewed in Poetry in December 1932.[15]

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 Wyeth never published another book of poems and, barring the rediscovery of unpublished manuscripts by his family, This Man's Army will likely remain his sole contribution to American poetry.

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.[16]

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."[17]

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.[18]

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."[25]

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."[26]

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.[27]

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."[28]

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.[28]

In 1994, Omanson sent Gioia a copy of This Man's Army and asked for his opinion.[29]

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."[29]

Although he never addressed his doubts to Omanson at the time,[30] 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."[29]

In October 2008, a new edition of "This Man's Army," with a biographical and interpretive introduction by Dana Gioia (which first appeared in the 2008 Summer issue of the Hudson Review), 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."[7]