Alan Seeger

Background

Alan Seeger was born on June 22, 1888, in New York. He was the son of Charles Louis Seeger, a businessman, and Elise Simmons (Adams) Seeger. His sister, Elizabeth, and brother, Charles (who became a noted musicologist), were close in age.

Education

Seeger attended the Staten Island Academy and then the Horace Mann School in Manhattan until the age of twelve. His family then moved to Mexico City; in 1902 Alan returned with his brother Charles to New York to attend the Hackley School, in Tarrytown. Following his graduation from the Hackley School, Seeger attended Harvard University, where, as a budding poet, he was influenced by the Romantic poets while other poets at Harvard, such as T. S. Eliot, were experimenting with more modem verse. He also translated Dante and Ariosto and helped edit the Harvard Monthly, where he published many of his poems. He graduated from Harvard with a Bachelor of Arts in 1910.

Career

After graduating, Seeger moved to Greenwich Village in New York City. There he attempted to live out his romanticized notion of bohemian life, living wholly through the senses (as opposed to the mind). His father was not pleased with his decision to evade the pursuit of a responsible career in favor of the pursuit of beauty. Still, Seeger continued writing poetry and slept on the couch of his classmate and notorious revolutionary, John Reed. After two years Seeger decided New York did not live up to his ideals so, with funding from admiring friends, he left for Paris.

In Paris, Seeger reveled in his new friendships among the artists in the Latin Quarter. He found his ideals of beauty embodied by the city. There is also evidence that he fell in love in the poems “Do You Remember Once” and “The Rendezvous,” and also in a telegram to his father. When war broke out between France and Germany in 1914, Seeger enlisted in the French Foreign Legion to defend his beloved France. Apparently seeking the utmost of excitement in life, Seeger also had a fatalistic streak and seemed attracted to the possibility of his death. In 1916, Seeger died (ironically on July 4th) in the attack on Belloy-en-Santerre, where he was shot in the stomach. He was buried in a mass grave. Seeger’s collected Poems were published in 1917 to mixed reviews. Still, Seeger’s poetry remained popular throughout the war with soldiers in the trenches and with supporters at home.

Achievements

• Alan Seeger is best known for his war poem, “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” and has often been compared with Rupert Brooke, a contemporary English soldier-poet who also died in World War I. Following his death, the French military awarded him the Croix de Guerre and the Medaille Militaire.
  
  The French have particularly honored Seeger as a poet who memorialized the fighting that took place in their country during World War I, and they have published numerous tributes to him since his death. A street in Biarritz, France, was named after Seeger in the 1970s.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Letters And Diary Of Alan Seeger

    (“I HAVE a rendezvous with Death At some disputed barrica...)

    1917
  • The Poetry Of Alan Seeger 1916

Views

In his letters, Seeger told of crowded quarters, filth, cold and misery; but only his romantic views of the war make their way into his poetry, unlike that of more realistic and anti-war poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. His admiration for Sir Philip Sidney and familiarity with the age of chivalry caused him to cast his comrades as medieval crusaders. Ever a fatalist, the outcome of the war was of less interest to Seeger than the glory of comradeship and adventure.

Personality

Seeger has been criticized for his impersonal, conventional, and idealizing verses, but critics acknowledge these as being the weaknesses of youth.

Quotes from others about the person

• “Seeger was an appalling wreck before the war.” - Victor Chapman
  
  "Although many of Seeger’s poems are now, with justice, labeled second rate, they are still valuable, as a manifestation of the idealism that swept over his generation.”

Connections

Father:

Charles Louis Seeger

Mother:

Elise Simmons (Adams) Seeger

Sister:

Elizabeth Seeger

Brother:

Charles Seeger

December 14, 1886 – February 7, 1979

Charles Louis Seeger, Jr. was an American musicologist, composer, teacher, and folklorist.

nephew:

Pete Seeger

May 3, 1919 – January 27, 2014

Peter Seeger was an American folk singer and social activist.

nephew:

Mike Seeger

August 15, 1933 – August 7, 2009

Mike Seeger was an American folk musician and folklorist.

niece:

Peggy Seeger

Born on June 17, 1935.

Margaret "Peggy" Seeger is an American folksinger.

Friend:

John Silas Reed

October 22, 1887 – October 17, 1920

John Silas Reed was an American journalist, poet, and socialist activist, best remembered for Ten Days That Shook the World, his firsthand account of the November 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, when Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia.

Friend:

Thomas Eliot

26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965

Thomas Stearns Eliot "one of the twentieth century's major poets", was also an essayist, publisher, playwright, and literary and social critic.

Friend:

Walter Lippmann

September 23, 1889 – December 14, 1974

Walter Lippmann was an American writer, reporter, and political commentator famous for being among the first to introduce the concept of Cold War, coining the term "stereotype" in the modern psychological meaning, and critiquing media and democracy in his newspaper column and several books, most notably his 1922 book Public Opinion.

References

• Scepticisms: Notes on Contemporary Poetry
  1919
• Victor Chapman's Letters From France As the First World War ground into its third year in 1916, America still remained uncommitted to intervention in what some in that nation regarded as a purely European affair.
  1917
• DLB 45: American Poets, 1880-1945 The history of American writing (and especially poetry) in the twentieth century can be read as the history of a language gradually acquiring native speakers, when there were none before, states this DLB volumes foreword.
  1986
• American Fighters in the Foreign Legion In 1914 a group of young Americans found the only way they could volunteer to help defend France was to enlist in the Foreign Legion.
  1930
• Sound no trumpet: The life and death of Alan Seeger
  1967