Pulitzer Prize winning poet Louis Simpson served in the 101st Airborne Division in World War Two, and has written memorably about his experience in one of the war’s bloodiest.

Battles in the battle of the Bulge at Bastogne. I remember it vividly as though someone were putting on an enormous panorama for me. I’m grateful to have seen it. A horizon ringed with fire here and there, and the outfit to which I belong in the middle of that, and being threatened with annihilation. And to me it was in retrospect, not not when it was actually going on.

So much. It seemed to me that it was like an enormously planned thing to look at. And of course, I was glad when it was over because it was painful. It was, many unpleasant things, but to have seen it for me is a remarkable event of my life. I think that when you have an experience such as battle, it changes you permanently in some way.

I think that’s true of most men or women who have been in actual fighting. It changes you sometimes for the worse, I suppose, and sometimes for the better. I just had a crack. I cracked up after the war. I did my duty, and when I went home after the war, I wrote ferociously. I was at the typewriter all the time, didn’t eat, and had a complete breakdown.

I had to put myself together again mentally so I could function. And it still is to me, a tremendous reality battle. Things imprinted on my memory. So clearly on such a grand scale that it is as though I were put there on purpose to talk about it or write something about it.

Tags: Poetry