Coming Out of War combines historical and social commentary with observations on the visual arts and music by Charles Ives, Irving Berlin, Paul Simon and Benjamin Britten, among others. Stout finds most poetry emerging from the two world wars to be antimilitary, and of that poetry, most is predominantly antiwar. Rarely does twentieth-century poetry celebrate the heroic.
World War I changed the thinking of a generation, which became characterized by disillusionment and irony. World War II poetry differed with the new experience of vast civilian casualties, and often had "a sense of guilt for actions performed in the course of duty." Stout extensively discusses 20th century war poems by non-combatants, primarily women, like Vera Brittain, Margaret Sackville, Amy Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop and Gwendolyn Brooks.
A common theme of poetry from both wars is the abundant folly of the military, and the distance from danger of the politicians and statesmen who send young men off to war. In this, the poems are timeless. Wilfred Owen wrote "Parable" in 1918, using the story of Abraham and Isaac, turning the familiar ending around and revealing the "malice of the old against the young--the evil that Owen, Sassoon and other poets saw behind the sacrifice of a generation":
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
Theodore Roethke, in his only poem that comments on current events, says in "Lull (November, 1939)", "The arbitrators wait; / The newsmen suck their thumbs."
Stout also writes about more recent poets, for whom "the war remained a compelling and torturous preoccupation decades afterward for people too young to have witnessed the events they wrote about."
In conclusion she asks why all these poets (and other artists) have failed to bring about an end to war. After exploring a number of reasons, she declares that, nonetheless, artists can help us feel the pity of it all. "Pity does educate the heart. . . . Poets and artists compel us to mourn." And if the first casualty of war is truth, as Senator Hiram Johnson said in 1917, we must remember that "Honest language is the poet's reason for being." Wilfred Owen, in his visionary poem "At a Calvary Near the Ancre," declared that "we don't need any more 'scribes' who 'bawl allegiance to the state,' but rather writers who make it their mission to utter the most truthful words they can, even if it means the ugliest words they can, in allegiance to humankind."
One of the pleasures of Coming Out of War is the exposure to poets who are not as well known as Sassoon, Eliot, cummings or Jarrell, like Edmund Blunden and Sterling Brown. Fans of the Inspector Rutledge or Maisie Dobbs mysteries would be especially interested in Stout's wise and learned book. Rich with expressive prose (on Wallace Stevens: "His poems are like freshly washed windows with no streaks") and absorbing history, it opens up new terrain for the reader and encourages one to read further, to listen to unfamiliar music. In a word, it is compelling.--Marilyn Dahl