This study explores the war poetry of nine American veterans who served during World War II. It compares the efforts of those men who had established themselves as poets prior to or during the war (Karl Shapiro, Randall Jarrell, John Ciardi, and William Meredith) with those whose poetic careers developed after the war ended (Louis Simpson, James Dickey, Richard Hugo, Howard Nemerov, and Lincoln Kirstein). An examination of their military careers illuminates how their wartime experiences affected the content as well as the style of their poems written both during and after the war. Each man's poetry was directly influenced by his personal involvement with the combat environment: the closer the combat experience, the more personal the poetry; the more distant the combat experience, the more detached the poetry.

Cecil Foster was born in Midland County, Michigan, on August 30, 1925. He endured economic and emotional hardship during his youth, living in a poor environment, losing his mother before he was six, and being separated from his brothers, sisters, and father. He joined the Army Air Force in 1943 as a private at the height of the World War II buildup and retired in 1975 as a lieutenant colonel. During his 32 years with the Air Force, Foster served in several different capacities - pilot, celestial navigator, radar-navigator-bombardier, intercept director, and squadron commander. A major focus of this work is Foster's Air Force career in the Korean War where he was one of the highest-scoring aces of the air war. His record of nine MiGs destroyed places him 12 on a list of 38 aces. Every one of the aircraft he destroyed was shot down in the area known as ""MiG Alley,"" a smali section of airspace along the Yalu River, which separated North Korea from China.