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Bellinglise
Liebestod
Resurgam
A Message to America
Introduction and Conclusion of a Long Poem
Ode in Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen for France

Introduction by William Archer

This book contains the undesigned, but all the more spontaneous and authentic,
biography of a very rare spirit. It contains the record of a short life,
into which was crowded far more of keen experience and high aspiration--of
the thrill of sense and the rapture of soul--than it is given to
most men, even of high vitality, to extract from a life of twice the length.
Alan Seeger had barely passed his twenty-eighth birthday, when,
charging up to the German trenches on the field of Belloy-en-Santerre,
his "escouade" of the Foreign Legion was caught in a deadly flurry
of machine-gun fire, and he fell, with most of his comrades,
on the blood-stained but reconquered soil. To his friends
the loss was grievous, to literature it was--we shall never know how great,
but assuredly not small. Yet this was a case, if ever there was one,
in which we may not only say "Nothing is here for tears,"
but may add to the well-worn phrase its less familiar sequel:

Nothing to wail
Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt,
Dispraise, or blame,--nothing but well and fair,
And what may quiet us in a death so noble.

Of all the poets who have died young, none has died so happily.
Without suggesting any parity of stature, one cannot but think
of the group of English poets who, about a hundred years ago,
were cut off in the flower of their age. Keats, coughing out his soul
by the Spanish Steps; Shelley's spirit of flame snuffed out
by a chance capful of wind from the hills of Carrara;
Byron, stung by a fever-gnat on the very threshold of his great
adventure--for all these we can feel nothing but poignant unrelieved regret.
Alan Seeger, on the other hand, we can very truly envy. Youth had given him
all that it had to give; and though he would fain have lived
on--though no one was ever less world-weary than he--yet in the plenitude
of his exultant strength, with eye undimmed and pulse unslackening,
he met the death he had voluntarily challenged, in the cause
of the land he loved, and in the moment of victory. Again and again,
both in prose and in verse, he had said that this seemed to him
a good death