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This Man's Army - A War in Fifty-odd Sonnets (Paperback)
Loot Price: R372
Discovery Miles 3 720
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This Man's Army - A War in Fifty-odd Sonnets (Paperback)
Series: Joseph M. Bruccoli Great War Series
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List price R499
Loot Price R372
Discovery Miles 3 720
You Save R127 (25%)
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This is a newly restored vision of World War I in verse from a
talented - and largely unknown - American soldier-poet.First
published in 1928, ""This Man's Army: A War in Fifty-Odd Sonnets""
is a gripping collection of narrative verse that represents the
beginning and end of the promising literary career of John Allan
Wyeth, a Princeton-educated French interpreter in the American
Expeditionary Force's Thirty-third Division. Though it received
strong reviews and enough sales to warrant a trade edition in 1929,
the volume faced the insurmountable adversary of the Great
Depression, and its author soon vanished from the literary
scene.This new edition of ""This Man's Army"" restores to print a
lost vantage point on the American experience in the Great War as
valuable for its high literary merits as for its historical
accuracy. The new introduction by Dana Gioia, chairman of the
National Endowment for the Arts, chronicles the life of the elusive
author and maps the book's critical reception and place in World
War I poetry, while new annotations by military historian B. J.
Omanson establish the historical context of individual poems.Wyeth
(1894-1981), the son of a prominent New York medical family, had
just completed a master's degree in French at Princeton when the
United States entered World War I in 1917 and he was motivated into
service. His fluency in French garnered him a position in the
Interpreters Corps as a second lieutenant in the Thirty-third
Division deployed to France and Belgium, and he served in this
capacity until his discharge in October 1919. ""This Man's Army""
is an autobiographical account of Wyeth's service years, detailing
his duties as interpreter, messenger, and occasionally sentry while
traveling town by town toward the German Hindenburg line. With an
unwavering eye for singular details, Wyeth recounts the devastating
effects of modern warfare, the cultural interactions of American
and French forces, and the lighthearted camaraderie of soldiers on
leave. Although he is keenly aware of the brutality of combat,
Wyeth's narrator never doubts the eventual American victory.The
term fifty-odd in the subtitle describes the sonnets both
quantitatively - in that there are fifty-five in total - and
qualitatively - as Wyeth stretched the traditional form through
incorporation of American and British military jargon and Jazz Age
slang as well as a new rhyme scheme unprecedented in the
seven-century history of the form.The republication of ""This Man's
Army"" restores to American historical literature an authentically
detailed and imaginatively idiosyncratic vision of the Great War
from a remarkable soldier-poet who shares universal truths about
warfare as relevant and provocative today as when they were
written.
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