when he called his pre-war poems "Juvenilia". Great emotions,
and perhaps great sorrows, would have come to him in due time,
and would have deepened and enriched his vein of song.
The first great emotion which found him, when he rallied
to the trumpet-call of France and freedom, did, as a matter of fact,
lend new reality and poignancy to his verse; but the soldier's life
left him small leisure for composition. We must regard his work, then,
as a fragment, a mere foretaste of what he might have achieved
had his life been prolonged. But, devoted though he was to his art,
he felt that to live greatly is better than to write greatly.
The unfulfilment of his poetic hopes and dreams meant
the fulfilment of a higher ambition.


Alan Seeger was born in New York on June 22nd, 1888.
His father and his mother belonged to old New England families.

When he was a year old his parents removed to Staten Island,
which forms, as it were, the stopper to the bottle of New York harbour.
There he remained until his tenth year, growing up along with
a brother and a sister, the one a little older, the other a little younger,
than himself. From their home on the heights of Staten Island,
the children looked out day by day upon one of the most romantic scenes
in the world -- the gateway to the Western Hemisphere.
They could see the great steamships of all the nations
threading their way through the Narrows and passing in procession
up the glorious expanse of New York Bay, to which the incessant local traffic
of tug-boats, river steamers and huge steam-ferries lent
an ever-shifting animation. In the foreground lay Robbins Reef Lighthouse,
in the middle distance the Statue of Liberty, in the background