'Midst the Pomp and Toil of War'

I learned that General George S. Patton, Jr. wrote poetry from my father, a man who never read poetry. I was a senior in high school. Days before we went to see the Oscar-winning film Patton, he delivered a lecture on the general’s military prowess, anti-Semitism and desire to “drive on to Moscow,” all of which he endorsed. He also explained that Patton hadn’t been killed in an innocent traffic accident, as reported. Rather, he was the victim of an elaborate Soviet/American conspiracy. In the film, George C. Scott as Patton recites the first and third-to-last stanzas of his poem “Through a Glass, Darkly” while strolling around a Carthaginian battlefield in Tunisia with Gen. Omar Bradley (Karl Malden): 

“Through the travail of the ages,

Midst the pomp and toil of war,

Have I fought and strove and perished

Countless times upon this star.

 

[…]

 

“So as through a glass and darkly

The age long strife I see

Where I fought in many guises,

Many names--but always me.”

 

In the Winter 1994 issue of The Sewanee Review, X.J. Kennedy reviewed The Poems of General George S. Patton, Jr.: Lines of Fire (ed. Carmine A. Prioli, Edwin Mellen Press, 1991). The review is cleverly titled: "Meter-Rattling." The book collects eighty-six poems, only a few of which had previously been published. Kennedy writes:

 

"Whomever critics and historians may hope to discover in this collection, it will not be a shrinking lyricist. By and large, the poet-general conforms to his public face, to the popular caricature of himself as a mean and snarling bulldog that Eisenhower kept on a chain. Even in his shadow-life as a rhymester, he wore a belligerent glare. What surprises you is that so active and uncontemplative a man should have stockpiled so much verse.”

 

Kennedy takes no cheap shots. His review is critical but respectful, and he makes few claims for the quality of Patton’s verse.

 

“[I]t would seem that for a poet Patton was singularly lucky in his upbringing. Afflicted with severe dyslexia, he was tutored on the family ranch in California’s San Gabriel Valley, where his father, a lawyer turned vintner and speculator, read aloud to him from the Iliad and [Walter] Scott’s romances. When at twelve he belatedly started school, he astonished his school master by quoting aloud a long piece of Rasselas, which he had learned by heart although he could neither read nor write.” 

 

In his strongest condemnation, Kennedy writes that “at worst the horrors of battle become, in Patton’s hands, horrors of language as well,” and quotes this stanza:

 

“The man beside me shuddered,

His brains shut out my sight.

I tried to wipe the goo away

And when I woke ’twas night.”

 

I admire Kennedy’s restraint. His review could have turned into an exercise in shooting ducks in a bathtub or a self-righteous firing squad. He treats Patton fairly and concludes:

 

“The uniqueness of Patton as a poet, and his failure to conquer Mount Parnassus, stem from his attitude toward war -- after all, his central theme. A dedicated professional to whom carnage was all part of the job, Patton saw ‘the white hot joy/ Of taking human life’ as the juiciest perk. . . . No other poet I know -- not Wilfred Owen nor Keith Douglas, not Randall Jarrell nor Isaac Rosenberg, despite all the hideous evidence they bring to their case against war -- knows war so intimately well, or leaves us in the end with a poorer opinion of it.”