This is the complete soulworking of an unsung hero, a true romantic whose lust for living life to the edge of sensation drove him into the apocalypse of World War One and to death itself. Alan Seeger ranks not just as a noble-hearted soldier, but as a young American writer whose ideal became his adopted country, France - a kind of unearthly chivalric knight who turned his back on the life of profit and loss in
New York to pick up the ancient song of the troubadours and the crusaders in Europe. A bohemian who hung out with artists and writers in the culture beat of Paris in 1913 - a painter with words that ring out hero - one of -those tragic, isolated, incredibly vulnerable young men who reject their youthful perfection, their crowds of friends, their aesthetic hedonism to give themselves up to the destiny of the frontline. For Alan Seeger his life was not worth, a scrap, however blissfully relished, compared to that second of complete and knowing self-sacrifice for the freedom to live. These poems and letters, written with the zeal and verve of a young man possessed with the romantic's ideal of truth and beauty in nature mark his brief life with the intensity of his vision. Read in conjunction with his letters and diaries of Volume II, they resonate with the joy of sensation and the thrill-seeking and throat-achingly beautiful hedonism of a young man in love with the world he explores and now stands to loose. This classical hero was to taste the unforgettable - war itself - in his fight for freedom and for France. There is no big, tragic language that can describe the agony of loss or his suffering or the violent and-evil destruction that he witnessed, only the simplicity and heartwrung honesty of his letters home written in the same springtime idyll of his ju
venilia but filled now with the tragic depth of his understanding of his and out fragile mortality. Volume III takes us deeper still into the eye of this courageous young poet. Karl Lagerfeld's visual journey in photographs lights up those intense landscapes, those epiphanies of land and sky which triggered the poet's understanding of the beauty and the thrill of being alive, of having something to fight for.
This is the complete soulworking of an unsung hero, a true romantic whose lust for living life to the edge of sensation drove him into the apocalypse of World War One and to death itself. Alan Seeger ranks not just as a noble-hearted soldier, but as a young American writer whose ideal became his adopted country, France - a kind of unearthly chivalric knight who turned his back on the life of profit and loss in
New York to pick up the ancient song of the troubadours and the crusaders in Europe. A bohemian who hung out with artists and writers in the culture beat of Paris in 1913 - a painter with words that ring out hero - one of -those tragic, isolated, incredibly vulnerable young men who reject their youthful perfection, their crowds of friends, their aesthetic hedonism to give themselves up to the destiny of the frontline. For Alan Seeger his life was not worth, a scrap, however blissfully relished, compared to that second of complete and knowing self-sacrifice for the freedom to live. These poems and letters, written with the zeal and verve of a young man possessed with the romantic's ideal of truth and beauty in nature mark his brief life with the intensity of his vision. Read in conjunction with his letters and diaries of Volume II, they resonate with the joy of sensation and the thrill-seeking and throat-achingly beautiful hedonism of a young man in love with the world he explores and now stands to loose. This classical hero was to taste the unforgettable - war itself - in his fight for freedom and for France. There is no big, tragic language that can describe the agony of loss or his suffering or the violent and-evil destruction that he witnessed, only the simplicity and heartwrung honesty of his letters home written in the same springtime idyll of his ju
venilia but filled now with the tragic depth of his understanding of his and out fragile mortality. Volume III takes us deeper still into the eye of this courageous young poet. Karl Lagerfeld's visual journey in photographs lights up those intense landscapes, those epiphanies of land and sky which triggered the poet's understanding of the beauty and the thrill of being alive, of having something to fight for.