ABSTRACT
On December 4, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour and struck simultaneous blows on the Philippines and Malaya and, on the following day, the United States declared war on the aggressors. Three days later Germany and Italy joined Japan in war against the United States and the Americans were plunged into the maelstrom in which for almost two years the British and Commonwealth forces had been struggling, virtually alone, against the Axis Forces. The American poets who either volunteered for, or were drafted into one or other of the armed services found themselves, as writers, in a quite different situation from that which their British counterparts had known in 1939, for, in the literature of the United States there was no substantial tradition of poetry from the trenches, nor had the British poets of the 1914-1918 war exercised any significant influence on American writing between the wars.
