Ireland’s Exiled Children: America and the Easter Rising

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AT 2:30 ON THE AFTERNOON of Saturday, April 29, 1916, P. H. Pearse offered the rebel force’s unconditional surrender, and at 3:45 he signed a general order to put down all weapons “to prevent the further slaughter of Dublin citizens, and in the hope of saving the lives of our followers now surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered.”¹ After five and a half days of intense fighting, the dead and wounded totaled more than three thousand people, while over two hundred buildings in Dublin were destroyed or damaged.

Joyce Kilmer

The news dominated the American newspapers. That same day, the New York Times published eight front-page stories about the Rising (out of a total of eighteen of varying lengths) and eight more covering it on the second page (where four articles from the front page were continued). The situation in Ireland was also the subject of an editorial and a column of commentary. The Rising received voluminous journalistic attention in America, with the Times alone devoting page 1 coverage to it for fourteen straight days, from April 25 through May 8. It was as though the war being waged in Europe had opened another front—and this one came out of the blue as a manifestation of rebelliousness within what was then called “the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.” The short-lived militaristic adventurism in Ireland intersected with other war news, including reports about the Battle of Verdun in France, then in its third of ten bloody months—resulting, ultimately, in almost 700,000 deaths. That spring of 1916 Britain was on edge and under attack from German zeppelins and U-boats, so an internal insurrection spelled unprecedented trouble that conflict-centric journalists sought to describe and explain. Not knowing how events might play out—could additional acts of violence break out beyond the general vicinity of Dublin after the formal surrender?—news organizations in the United States tried to keep up with information from abroad, which was subject to British wartime censorship and often delayed.

The Rising also had an irresistible local angle, particularly for big-city newspapers. The American Irish wanted to know what was happening and how they might respond. With domestic interest piqued, much of the coverage had a dual perspective. Accounts with London or Dublin datelines appeared together with reaction stories about first- or second-generation Irish Americans and their concerns, or reports about the policy implications of the rebels’ cause. Though censorial press restrictions hampered the flow of information originating overseas, what was covered in the United States took full advantage of the First Amendment, and all viewpoints—pro-Rising, anti-Rising, support for Britain, criticism of Britain—received amplification as the events unfolded. Throughout the nineteen days encompassing the Rising and the executions, April 24 through May 12, news about Ireland made the front page of the New York Times seventeen times, the Boston Globe sixteen, the Washington Post thirteen, and the Chicago Tribune and the New York World eleven. The “exiled children” were kept fully informed, and they used what they learned to form their opinions about what to think and how (or whether) to act.

Journalists, however, weren’t the only ones to take up the Rising and its aftermath as a topic worthy of consideration and comment. Poets, playwrights, and novelists reflected on what had happened and contributed to the responsorial chorus. On May 4, the New York World included in its package of stories, under the headline “Shoot Four Irish Uprising Leaders in London Tower” (actually, three leaders—P. H. Pearse, Tom Clarke, and Thomas MacDonagh—were executed in Dublin on May 3), a prominent text box with George Bernard Shaw’s reaction. Then living in England and writing his opinion for an American audience, Shaw, who was described as “the distinguished Irish playwright,” was both witty and Solomonic: “Silly, ignorant, wrong-headed—but honorable, brave and republican.”² The statement was widely quoted throughout the American press, and it suggested the complexity of arriving at a final judgment at this stage.

From an American perspective, the works of Joyce Kilmer in addressing the Rising stand out from other responses for their breadth, variety, and consequence. In addition, Kilmer’s life bears witness not only to the U.S. reaction to events in Ireland but also to what was happening throughout Europe. His character and deliberate self-invention shaped what he believed, wrote, and did. Kilmer made studied and deliberate choices of who he would be and how he would be perceived. In his mind, as well as in his heart, he, too, was one of the “exiled children.”

By the time of the Rising, Kilmer, only twenty-nine years old (and considerably more youthful in appearance), with a stocky build and medium height, was well known as a poet, journalist, literary critic, editor, and lecturer. His popularity in 1916 derived principally from one twelve-line poem that he had published three years earlier in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, the modernist, groundbreaking journal edited by Harriet Monroe that featured the work of (among others) W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams. Kilmer’s poem “Trees” begins with thirteen words countless schoolchildren would later memorize:

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

The short, final stanza contrasts two acts of creation:

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.³

Few poems have enjoyed both fame and familiarity, but “Trees” kept Kilmer in the public’s mind for generations. The association resulted in the designation (in 1936) of the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest, in North Carolina, by the United States Forest Service, while several elementary and middle schools were also named for him. In 1938, however, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren published the first of several editions of Understanding Poetry, which later the New York Times in 1979 called “very likely the single most influential text in the teaching of poetry in this generation and a foundation stone of the New Criticism.”⁴ Brooks and Warren begin their exegesis of “Trees” by saying: “This poem has been very greatly admired by a large number of people. The fact that it has been popular does not necessarily condemn it as a bad poem. But it is a bad poem.”⁵ Their New Critical analysis left not a single branch or leaf to admire. The Irish Times (in a 1961 editorial comment) took a less academic and more balanced approach to what it refers to, without giving the title, as “Joyce Kilmer’s poem”: “It is not a good poem, yet it obviously expressed something that a lot of people felt; for it has been learned by school-children in many parts of the world, it used to be a favourite party recitation, and it was even set to music.”⁶ By the time Ogden Nash’s equally famous parody appeared in 1932—“I think I shall never see” / “a billboard lovely as a tree”—the original was set in the public imagination.

Over a century after “Trees” first appeared, the poem seems anachronistic to the point of satire or even ridicule. Indeed, since 1986, the Philolexian Society of Kilmer’s alma mater, Columbia University, has sponsored what is called the “Alfred Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest,” complete with a dramatic reading of “Trees” to conclude an evening of competitive parody. Though still anthologized in collections of American poetry—the poem, for example, appears in the Library of America’s volume of early twentieth-century verse ⁷—“Trees” tends to obscure the sturdy stand of poems, essays, and feature articles Kilmer produced from 1913 until his death in 1918, works that brought him international recognition during his lifetime. To a certain extent, the enormous attention “Trees” received ultimately became a literary albatross, preventing people today from seeing him as a significant Catholic writer, an early champion of the poetic achievement of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and an astute commentator on the Easter Rising.

Despite his productivity as a poet (three book-length collections between 1911 and 1917), Kilmer primarily earned his living, from 1913 until 1917, writing for the New York Times Magazine. What he called his “Sunday stories” appeared with almost weekly regularity, and from time to time he even responded to the news through poetry. For instance, after the Germans torpedoed the RMS Lusitania off the coast of Ireland, killing 1,198 of the 1,959 on board (including 128 Americans), he composed “The White Ships and the Red,” which was widely republished at the time and frequently included in anthologies of the early twentieth century and the Great War. The sinking occurred on May 7, 1915. The Times Magazine devoted its first page nine days later to the eleven-stanza poem, with an original drawing surrounding it. Strikingly, the Lusitania is never named. A contemporary reader would have known the identity of the red ship of the title and the news-chasing verse, which concludes with this memorable image:

When God’s great voice assembles

The fleet on Judgment Day,

The ghosts of ruined ships will rise

In sea and strait and bay.

Though they have lain for ages

Beneath the changeless flood,

They shall be white as silver,

But one—shall be like blood.⁸

A year later, on May 7, 1916—during the first executions—Kilmer published a New York Times Magazine article with the title “Poets Marched in the Van of Irish Revolt.” He conveyed the sense that the insurrection was a word-inspired adventure. “A poetic revolution—indeed, a poets’ revolution—that is what has been happening in Ireland during the last two weeks, says Padraic Colum, himself an Irish poet now in New York,” Kilmer began his lengthy article before arguing that the Rising was “closely related to the work of the Gaelic League, to the Irish Theatre Movement, and to that phase of literary activity which is termed the Celtic Renascence or the Neo-Celtic Movement. The leaders of the movement were, for the most part, men of letters.”⁹ Kilmer established the Rising’s place in contemporary Irish culture. Though he was pursuing a breaking news story, he was putting it into a perspective far different from the deadline-driven reports for his own and other newspapers, playing off those reports but then circling back to advance his theme: “The leaders of the revolutionary forces were almost without exception men of literary tastes and training, who went into battle, as one of the dispatches phrased it, ‘with a revolver in one hand and a copy of Sophocles in the other.’ ”¹⁰

In addition to Colum, the article took up the work of P. H. Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, Joseph Mary Plunkett, James Connolly, Robert Casement, Eoin MacNeill, and Constance Markievicz. There was even consideration given to the play Cathleen Houlihan by W. B. Yeats, which Colum remarked “had more to do than any other purely literary writing in inflaming the young Irishmen with love of country and passionate desire for freedom.”¹¹ Colum—who later in 1916 co-edited with Edward J. O’Brien two editions of the collection Poems of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, featuring Pearse, MacDonagh, Plunkett, and Casement—linked Yeats to the Rising early on, an association Yeats himself waited a long time to make. In one of his last poems before his death in 1939 (“Man and the Echo”), Yeats expressed his anxiety about the connection between violence and his work:

I lie awake night after night

And never get the answers right.

Did that play of mine send out

Certain men the English shot?¹²

Kilmer reprinted poems by MacDonagh and Casement in his text, which included photos of Pearse, Clarke, MacDonagh, Colum, and Markievicz. By dealing with key figures as serious thinkers and writers, Kilmer put a human face on the Rising’s participants—and elevated their efforts to express nationalistic longing. The article concluded with a statement from Colum that revealed why the alienation of the rebel-minded erupted in the actions of Easter Week. Colum argued that the Irish read and admired English literature and liked the English people. “What we cannot endure is simply the English Government—simply the imposition upon us of a Government from the outside with which we have no sympathy, and which has no sympathy with us. And the greatest sensitivity is to be found on the highest level—it is the intellectuals among us who feel the agony the most, and are the first to revolt against it.”¹³

Kilmer’s article is noteworthy for its approach and depth. Despite all the U.S. journalistic attention to the Rising, the coverage suffered from factual mistakes (from which Kilmer wasn’t exempt, reporting that the executions occurred in London), a reliance on unverified rumors, and, most important, lack of direct access to information. Journalists were forced to peer through a fog of war and were hampered by institutional restraints, making any objective perspective nearly impossible. One wire-service dispatch that appeared on April 28 in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and several other newspapers described the basic problem: “Dublin is further from London today than Peking is from New York, so far as communication for the general public is concerned. No Irish newspapers have reached here [London] since the rising, and passenger traffic has been for the most part suspended. The only information comes through official channels.”¹⁴

In a news vacuum and reliance on “official channels,” with censorship and martial law in effect, publishing what was available became the only alternative. Except for local stories capturing Irish-American reaction, the early coverage drew extensively from British sources, with their biases. Roger Casement figured prominently at the beginning; it was not until Sunday, April 30 (the day after the surrender), that the name of the leader of the Provisional Government surfaced—and even then it was spelled “Pearce” rather than “Pearse,” and he was called “Peter” or “J. H.” That same day, a page 1 story in the New York Times reported, “Leader Connolly Killed,” an erroneous report also printed in the Washington Post.

Citing inaccuracies in the coverage is less an attempt at criticism than at transparency. In this case, the chestnut that journalism provides “a rough first draft of history” applied, with rough connoting “partial” and “sometimes suspect” information. Kilmer’s lengthy article, though, deserves consideration for its comprehensiveness and for identifying the centrality of poets and writers in the Irish cause. The romance of intellectuals being in the vanguard of political action—especially in Ireland, with its reverence for literati—took root early on and helped make the rebels more sympathetic and memorable. In an essay about the fifty-year commemoration of the Rising, Mary E. Daly quoted the American columnist Mary McGrory that 1916 “was the only revolution which was fomented and fought by poets.”¹⁵

Kilmer’s articles for the New York Times Magazine stood out from other coverage by emphasizing the involvement of poets. Indeed, on the editorial and the commentary pages of the daily New York Times, there was no ambiguity about the newspaper’s viewpoint on the Rising and its meaning. A day after the first reports of the revolt, a three-paragraph item in the “Topics of the Times” opinion column focused on Casement. “Charity, seeking, as charity must, an explanation that will serve as an excuse for a crime as abhorrent to all the world as treason, finds first and only the possibility that Sir Roger Casement was a victim of the neurasthenia that so often diminishes or destroys the moral responsibility of men who stay too long and work too hard in the tropics.” After additional speculation and criticism of the Germans, the comment concluded that Casement’s actions were “a sort of suicide, for the plea of insanity, the only plea his friends can make, is unlikely to save him.”¹⁶

The next day Casement was again one of the “Topics of the Times,” but his actions were now evaluated in the wider context of Irish history. He was compared unfavorably to Wolfe Tone, one of the leaders of the Rebellion of 1798, and his part in a more encompassing movement was not so clear-cut: “Discretion will probably decide against giving a cause as bad as his its martyr.”¹⁷ Both of these anti-Casement outbursts appeared as commentary on the editorial page. However, beginning April 29, the New York Times started a campaign of vehement opposition to the rebel cause. Sarcasm and stereotyping provided the principal elements of an editorial simply titled “Ireland.” Casement, “that treasonable Irishman,” was ridiculed (as he was in another “Topics of the Times” item on the same page, called “A Familiar Form of Insanity”), and this editorial suggested that “the whole expedition was planned by the Germans as a means to get rid of a tall, deep-bearded conspirator whose efforts to explain Irish politics had begun to menace their reason.”

The editorial was then broadened in scope to survey Irish history from the time of “clan against clan, King against King” to the present. British rule had led to “a narrative in rebellion,” which, in the newspaper’s opinion, was anything but admirable: “Rebellion has been the chronic, almost to say the natural, condition of Ireland, being now and then only a little more acute than usual. Never has she been able to rebel unanimously or by a very large majority.” The last paragraph solidified the anti-Irish stance of the Times editorial policy: “Never has Ireland been free, and yet she has all the more passion for freedom. What these present rebels want is not to be free of England. They pursue an ideal of freedom. England is the symbol of restraint. If it were not England, it might be a King. If it were not a King, it might be the fairies that go about in Ireland, assuming fantastic shapes, to frighten people and make them do all the things they do not want to do.”¹⁸

On May 2, under the heading “The Irish Folly,” the Times argued that the revolt “had only evil fruits.” This time fairies do not frolic at the conclusion. The editorial took on Irish-American supporters, such as John Devoy and his followers in Clan na Gael, in a 108-word tirade:

The leaders of the movement cannot be acquitted of responsibility, they are altogether blameworthy, but a sterner censure even may justly be visited upon those in this country who have encouraged them and now commend their acts of incredible folly and rashness, for when any man of the Irish race in America speaks in praise of the deplorable Sinn Fein escapade it is hard to shut out the belief that a seeking for popularity here and a political motive purely domestic, rather than sincere sympathy with the Irish “cause” or hope for its success, have been the real prompting to such aid and comfort as has been given.¹⁹

Two days later another editorial, entitled “Fate of the Irish Rebels,” endorsed the first executions, noting “war is a stern business and the subject who sets himself against his King or the citizen who rises against his Government when the nation is straining every resource to overcome enemies in the field can hardly expect mercy.”²⁰ When Kilmer’s Times Magazine article appeared on May 7, readers of the Times found a detailed enunciation of a different, more compassionate perspective on the Rising from what they had received elsewhere in the newspaper up to that point. Kilmer took no cues or directions from the paper’s management, nor would he subsequently. What he wrote served as an explicit counterpoint to the editorial policy of his employer.

However, the extended and seemingly cold-blooded continuity of the punishment of the Rising’s leaders did not escape the attention of the Times. On page 1 for the edition of May 12, a dispatch with a London dateline began: “The most dangerous factor in Ireland’s situation which had been recognized since the brief rising flashed in the pan was that the punishment of the rebels would cause a reaction of sympathy among the warm-hearted and emotional people. This threatening danger appears to be fast materializing.”²¹ Already there was the suggestion that the public’s mood could prove volatile because of the circumstances involved. A modest shifting of opinion is even detectable on the paper’s editorial page that same day:

Fourteen persons have been executed, two or three apparently sacrificed to official stupidity. But the whole proceeding is incredibly stupid . . . unworthy of England. Leave that sort of thing to Germany. No matter if these misguided rebels, intellectuals, visionaries, and miscellaneous poor devils and scalawags were suborned and abetted by Germany. Only an Irish madman would look for help to the Prussian drill sergeants.

In the last paragraph, however, the Times regained its traditional moorings by complimenting “the noble, generous British” and the “Irish patriotism of John Redmond.”²²

How the New York Times handled the Rising and what followed is a case study of a serious American newspaper trying to provide a full accounting. News reports and feature articles, notably those by Kilmer, presented facts and context, while the editorials and commentary columns articulated opinions and leveled criticism. Interestingly, the Times itself had been on the receiving end of criticism one year earlier for taking what was perceived as an anti-German and pro-British bias. In his official, Times-published History of the New York Times: 1851–1921, Elmer Davis reported that at a U.S. Senate committee meeting in March of 1915 some senators accused the newspaper of advocating certain viewpoints in exchange for money.²³ Among specific charges leveled at the top editors of the Times was one they considered especially libelous—that the newspaper had received financial support from England, which directly influenced the content of what appeared in the paper. The “legend of British gold” and the rumor of foreign control of the paper directed the line of questioning of Senator Thomas J. Walsh of Montana, the chairman of the committee.²⁴ To what extent Walsh’s Irish-American heritage might have motivated his concern is unknown, though his biographer, J. Leonard Bates, notes sympathy for Irish-American causes as part of Walsh’s service, and on the opening page of his life of Walsh, he wrote, “Learning politics from his father, he functioned at times with the skills of an Irish politico.”²⁵ Besides inquiring about the ownership of the Times, Walsh and other members of the committee asked about certain stories. One particular pool report about war news from Europe, which was jointly sent to the Times and two other newspapers, differed in its conclusion from those of the other two. Carr Van Anda, managing editor of the Times, apparently tutored the Senate committee on his newspaper’s strict division between news and commentary: “That was done for the very good and sufficient reason that it was an expression of opinion by the writer.”²⁶

While other American newspapers at that time blurred the lines between facts and opinions, the Times tried to maintain a wall dividing distinct types of journalism. This approach reflected the philosophy of publisher Adolph S. Ochs, who purchased the paper in 1896 and introduced the slogan “All the News That’s Fit to Print” the same year. Ochs’s commitment to news rather than taking a stand was so serious that he even considered ending the publication of the editorial page.²⁷

As events in Ireland continued to receive news attention, Kilmer’s New York Times Magazine article in early May and his later one in August offered contextual background and elicited sympathy for participants in the Rising. He wasn’t alone. Opinion pages and Sunday feature newspaper sections in Boston, Chicago, Washington, and elsewhere probed behind surface facts to explain the larger story. Although, editorially, the Times stood four-square against the rebels, other major papers were less inclined to hew to a black-or-white opinion of the situation. As early as April 26, one day after news of the Rising broke, the Washington Post opined on “The Outbreak in Ireland” by focusing on Casement and how he “placed his head in the lion’s mouth, with dashing intrepidity bordering upon madness.” The editorial concluded by arguing that executing him would be a mistake. “Casement executed in the Tower would become a martyr, enshrined in Irish hearts, his faults forgotten, his mad exploit idealized and his example emulated.”²⁸ The possibility that Casement might become a martyr foreshadowed much of the future coverage.

On May 2, a day before the first executions, both the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune published editorials proposing the possibility of the British punishment becoming excessive. In its opening sentences, the Washington Post found fault with the Rising and Casement, “a harebrained if not insane agitator whose only successful stroke was the enlisting of German assistance. Why the German government or people lent any aid to Sir Roger is not apparent, since the Germans are not usually addicted to wild-goose chases.” Still, the editorial cautioned readers, the uprising was “a reminder that the Irish question remains to be settled. Ireland must have a greater measure of home rule. If the British government has not entirely lost its balance, it will not make fierce reprisals in Ireland, but will deal tolerantly even with the ringleaders of the insurrection.”²⁹ The Chicago Tribune followed a similar course in its editorial: “There is a hint that this now subdued Irish rebellion will not be followed by many executions to give a new set of memories to the Irish. It would be a wise England that saw the Irish revolt compassionately.”³⁰

Three days later—after Pearse, Clarke, and MacDonagh had been executed—the Chicago Tribune, in an editorial with the heading “Unnecessary and Inexpedient,” asserted that the executions had been a mistake. “It might have been far more effective to turn the three men loose in Dublin. Their heroism would have oozed away a little every time a citizen looked at the wrecked post office. The practical result of their fury would have established them in the minds of the comfortable, practical citizens as wild dreamers.”³¹ The Washington Post also published an editorial that denounced the first executions in no uncertain terms: “This hasty, ill-considered and unstatesmanlike act of political vengeance is bound to make still more bitter the relations between England and Ireland, and to be a fruitful source of trouble in the years to come.” Contrasting the leniency of the English in handling opposing combatants in the Boer War that took place from late 1899 until mid-1902, with the almost immediate assembling of firing squads in Dublin, the Washington Post asked: “How can any man have respect for law thus inequitably, unfairly and one-sidedly administered?”³²

These editorials and Kilmer’s long feature show how competing viewpoints were taking shape in American newspapers. The Rising might have been brief, disorganized, and ultimately unsuccessful, but the British response merited stern criticism. In other words, the action and reaction were judged almost simultaneously, with the evaluation of the reaction proving more influential. The “wild dreamers” did, indeed, become “martyrs,” and during that transformation American public opinion changed to the benefit of the rebels and their cause. Whatever people’s feelings about the rebellion itself, the aftermath turned public opinion against the British.³³ Meetings and rallies supporting the rebels and their cause took place across the United States. By mid-summer of 1916, what was called the “Irish Relief Fund” had collected humanitarian assistance of between $100,000 and $150,000—an amount slightly higher than Clan na Gael’s contribution to help mount the Rising.

In late June, Kilmer participated in a large memorial gathering in New York City to honor victims of the insurrection, especially the poets. As the New York Tribune noted, “Tears flowed plentifully at Central Park yesterday afternoon when the Irish poets of New York met to mourn their brothers who died in the Sinn Fein uprising.” Pearse, MacDonagh, and Plunkett were referred to as “the martyr poets” by the Tribune, and selections from their verse, along with poems and statements written for the occasion by several noted figures in American literary life (such as William Dean Howells, Louis Untermeyer, Harriet Monroe, and Edwin Markham), were read to the crowd. The Tribune account focused on Kilmer and the theme he had developed earlier in the Times Magazine. “The world used to despise the poet, calling him a long-haired, effeminate creature who shunned a man’s work,” he was quoted as saying. “It is no longer necessary to defend the poet against this calumny. It was the poets in Ireland who inspired this fight for freedom and it was the poets who fought.”³⁴ Possibly to avoid suggesting the ethical conflict of a staff member taking a definite stand on a current issue in public, the New York Times merely mentioned that Kilmer was among those who “read original poems,” devoting most of its coverage to the work “A Song for Ireland’s Martyred Poets” that Eleanor Rogers Cox composed for the occasion.³⁵

In his poetic contribution, “Easter Week,” Kilmer proved that he was not afraid to take on Yeats through direct address or to celebrate Ireland’s Catholicism (Kilmer had converted to Catholicism in 1913). The nine quatrains, with their intricate internal and end-line rhyme schemes, demonstrate Kilmer’s craftsmanship and his ability to imitate the rhythms of popular ballads. He dedicated the poem to the one rebel leader and poet he’d met in New York the summer before.

Easter Week

(In memory of Joseph Mary Plunkett)

(“Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,

It’s with O’Leary in the grave.”)

—William Butler Yeats.

“Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,

It’s with O’Leary in the grave.”

Then, Yeats, what gave that Easter dawn

A hue so radiantly brave?

There was a rain of blood that day,

Red rain in gay blue April weather.

It blessed the earth till it gave birth

To valour thick as blooms of heather.

Romantic Ireland never dies!

O’Leary lies in fertile ground,

And songs and spears throughout the years

Rise up where patriot graves are found.

Immortal patriots newly dead

And ye that bled in bygone years,

What banners rise before your eyes?

What is the tune that greets your ears?

The young Republic’s banners smile

For many a mile where troops convene.

O’Connell Street is loudly sweet

With strains of Wearing of the Green.

The soil of Ireland throbs and glows

With life that knows the hour is here

To strike again like Irishmen

For that which Irishmen hold dear.

Lord Edward leaves his resting place

And Sarsfield’s face is glad and fierce.

See Emmet leap from troubled sleep

To grasp the hand of Padraic Pearse!

There is no rope can strangle song

And not for long death takes his toll.

No prison bars can dim the stars

Nor quicklime eat the living soul.

Romantic Ireland is not old.

For years untold her youth shall shine.

Her heart is fed on Heavenly bread,

The blood of martyrs is her wine.³⁶

“Easter Week” was a finalist in the Poetry Society of America’s competition for the best poem of 1916, and Kilmer included it in his collection Main Street and Other Poems (1917). Nineteen-Sixteen: An Anthology was compiled by Edna C. FitzHenry and appeared in 1935. Kilmer’s “Easter Week” is the only contribution from an American of the sixty-two poems published in one of three categories: Prelude, Battle, and Requiem. Other contributors to the volume included W. B. Yeats, A. E. (George William Russell), P. H. Pearse, Joseph Mary Plunkett, Thomas MacDonagh, Roger Casement, Eva Gore-Booth, and Dora Sigerson Shorter. In 1951, Poetry Ireland published an “Easter Rising Memorial Issue” in honor of the thirty-fifth anniversary. Kilmer’s poem appeared in it as well. Over the years, Kilmer has become the U.S. poet most associated with the Rising on both sides of the Atlantic. In a 1966 survey of the poetry about 1916 for an Irish journal, Augustine Martin quoted three entire stanzas and then remarked: “Though an American, Kilmer was familiar enough with both Irish history and poetry to fasten, with the poet’s intuition, to the more evocative symbols of revolt.”³⁷

The poem struck chords that reverberated for readers in Irish America. Among Kilmer’s papers in the Georgetown University Library’s Special Collections Research Center is a letter from a New York attorney, John Jerome Rooney, dated March 31, 1917, almost a year after the poem was written. Complimenting Kilmer on addressing “the Irish struggles for liberty,” Rooney praised the poet’s “fine spirit and work in this matter,” but then used it as an excuse to mourn the loss of the “old American spirit.” He wrote: “People seem to divide now along lines of pro-German or pro-English and not upon the lines of the great American principle of the right of Nations to their own individual free life. That principle is and always was fundamental to American doctrine and practice.”³⁸ Rooney’s viewpoint was also Kilmer’s, a viewpoint he set down most forcefully in the poem “Apology,” another of his works about the Rising. He elevated writers of verse to a spiritual, even celestial status. In one stanza near the end, the three poets who helped mount the Rising (Pearse, Plunkett, and MacDonagh, rather than the mistaken “McDonough” in the published version) receive consideration along with three well-known English poets: Lord Byron, Shelley, and Leigh Hunt.

Lord Byron and Shelley and Plunkett,

McDonough and Hunt and Pearse

See now why their hatred of tyrants

Was so insistently fierce.

Is Freedom only a Will-o’-the-wisp

To cheat a poet’s eye?

Be it phantom or fact, it’s a noble cause

In which to sing and to die!³⁹

“Apology,” which Kilmer also collected in Main Street and Other Poems, makes “Freedom” and the “hatred of tyrants” fundamental human conditions—and worth the price of sacrificing one’s life.

Kilmer’s literary preoccupation with Irish figures and issues, topics to which he kept returning, developed from his adopted ethnic identity and his interpretation of what it had replaced. In a letter to his wife, Aline, herself an accomplished poet, he remarked that he had told a friend that he was “half-Irish.” “For proof of this, you have only to refer to the volumes containing the histories of my mother’s and my father’s families. Of course I am American, but one cannot be pure American in blood unless one is an Indian.”⁴⁰ Kilmer was adamant, imploring his wife in the same letter, “And don’t let anyone publish a statement contradictory to this.”⁴¹

One who challenged Kilmer’s statement that he was “half Irish” was Robert Cortes Holliday, Kilmer’s literary executor. In a lengthy memoir about his friend that introduced a posthumously published two-volume collection of Kilmer’s poetry and prose, Holliday wryly observed that while Kilmer’s “birth was not exactly eloquent of this fact,” he was Irish “in the sense of keenly savouring those things which are fine in the Irish character, and with characteristic gusto feeling within himself an affinity with them.”⁴² Whatever the precise proportion of his ancestral blood, Kilmer took his Irishness so seriously that his son, Kenton, devoted the longest chapter of Memories of My Father, Joyce Kilmer to “Our Irish and Irish-American Friends and Relations.” Kenton couldn’t substantiate his father’s “half Irish” claim, noting “I find no apparently Irish names among Dad’s ancestors on the Kilmer side.”⁴³

Clearly, however, Joyce Kilmer selected the heritage and identity most personally meaningful to the way he saw himself in a nation of immigrants. Kenton recalled that his father “was enamored of Irish history, Irish legend and literature, and Irish and Irish-American poetry.”⁴⁴ Kenton always remembered that his father would “frequent the company of Irish patriots, eager for Ireland to break free of British rule, but he also had some friends, still strongly Irish, who were for the modified autonomy called Home Rule.”⁴⁵ Kenton’s daughter, Miriam A. Kilmer, wrote after genealogical research about her grandfather: “His father was mostly German and English, his mother mostly English. … His passionate love for Ireland and the Irish is obvious, so we may say he was Irish by adoption.”⁴⁶

Kilmer felt kinship with the Irish because they embodied traits he admired. Their love of literature, spirited and sometimes raucous embrace of life, and their commitment to family all played a part. Most compelling for Kilmer was their devotion to the Catholic Church. From his conversion in 1913 until the end of his life, Kilmer was considered (in Holliday’s phrase) “the laureate of the Catholic Church,”⁴⁷ with religious themes and subjects a prime focus of his prose and poetry. Commenting on the work of Lionel Johnson, a nineteenth-century English poet and essayist, Kilmer noted: “He saw that the greatest glory of Ireland is her fidelity to the Catholic Faith, a fidelity which countless cruel persecutions have only strengthened.”⁴⁸ Like Kilmer, Johnson was a convert, and both of them viewed Ireland through the lens of religion. The linkage between Catholicism and Irish identity would become even more pronounced for Kilmer during his own war service.

As a staff-level contributor to the New York Times, Kilmer returned to the Rising with a poignant article entitled “Irish Girl Rebel Tells of Dublin Fighting,” which the Times Magazine published on August 20, 1916. This story—reprinted in full as an appendix at the end of this book—focused on Moira Regan, who served in Cumann na mBan, the women’s auxiliary of the Irish Volunteers, relating her experiences in the GPO and as a messenger for the rebels. No doubt informed of her arrival in New York by a republican friend, Kilmer developed the narrative by means of vivid details and direct quotations that contribute both immediacy and specificity, beginning with the subject herself:

Moira Regan is a slight, gray-eyed girl. There is a charming flavor of County Wexford in her manner and in her voice. But back of her gray eyes and charming manner there is a depth of tragic experience. For Moira Regan has worked night and day in a beleaguered fort, has breathed air redolent with gunpowder, and heard the groans of men torn by shot and shell. She has seen her friends led away to death, their bodies to be thrown into a pit of quicklime.⁴⁹

Kilmer lets Moira Regan tell exactly what happened from her perspective during the entire two-week period:

There are a few things that I’d like every one in America to know about this rising, and about the way in which the British officers and soldiers acted. When the rebels surrendered they were at first treated with great courtesy. The British officers complimented them on the bold stand they had made, and said they wished they had men like them in the British Army. But after they had surrendered they were treated in the worst possible way. They were cursed and insulted, marched to the Rotunda Gardens, and made to spend the night there in the wet grass. They were not given a morsel of food.⁵⁰

Regan went on to describe the harsh treatment the rebels received in jail, the reliance on dog biscuits for sustenance, and the cruel nature of the executions. Yet, despite or perhaps because of that treatment, there had been a “complete and amazing revival of Irish nationality. … [N]‌ow we have been awakened to the knowledge that there is a great difference between Ireland and England, that we are really a separate nation. Even the people who were not in sympathy with the rebels feel this now.”⁵¹

Nearly four months after the insurrection ended, it continued to reverberate across the Atlantic, and not just in the pages of John Devoy’s Gaelic American. Indeed, just a week earlier in the New York Times Magazine (August 13), the essay “Roger Casement, Martyr” by John Quinn, the prominent New York attorney and friend of Yeats, compared Casement to Wolfe Tone and John Brown. Though critical of Casement’s “faith in Germany,” as he put it, Quinn argued that Casement had “paid England’s price. Now it is England’s turn to pay. And England pays, and will continue to pay, in the pain of her admirers, in the silence of her defenders, in the loss of American sympathy.”⁵²

The attention the Rising and its aftermath generated in the American press did not escape the scrutiny of the British, who worried that it might create problems in Ireland, were it known there what was being reported. On June 1, General Sir John Maxwell, commander-in-chief of military forces in Ireland, established a Press Censor’s office in Dublin, and on June 5 the censor, Lieutenant-Colonel Lord Decies, issued a directive, with “CONFIDENTIAL” in capital letters and underlined at the top, that was distributed to every newspaper in Ireland. The document, included in the “Press Censorship Records 1916–1919” in the National Archives of Ireland, warned about the republication of certain journalistic reports:

You are requested to give careful consideration to the following before publication:

1.Resolutions and speeches of Corporations, County and Urban Councils and Boards of Guardians.

2.Letters from soldiers, connected with the late rising in Dublin.

3.Extracts from American newspapers, or private letters sent you from individuals received from America.

4.Criticisms in the form of letters from individuals on the late rising in Dublin, of a violent nature.

5.Letters sent you from men arrested in Dublin in connection with the late rising now in detention.

6.Indiscretions made by other papers either in Foreign or Home Press should not be published.

No objection will be taken to any publication of above provided the language is moderate; doubtful matter should be submitted before printing.⁵³

Despite this edict—which expresses explicit concern about journalistic or personal messages originating in the United States—borders between Ireland and America proved porous. The Gaelic American acquired a copy of this official directive and published it in a special box on July 8, 1916, with a Devoy-sounding editorial comment as a headline: “How the Irish Press Is Gagged.”⁵⁴ The Midland Reporter, based in Mullingar, somehow obtained Kilmer’s article about Moira Regan, reprinting it in toto on September 14, roughly a month after it appeared in the New York Times. Two days later, Kilmer’s article also appeared in the Roscommon Herald. Both the Midland Reporter and the Roscommon Herald were owned by Jasper Joseph Tully, and either he or someone working for him tried to defuse the explosive nature of the interview by burying it inside each weekly with a one-column headline, “Tales of the Rebellion,” and by printing this brief introduction, “The New York Times, a strong pro-Ally paper, prints the following. . . .”

The press censor, however, took immediate notice, firing off an inquiry to the attorney general for Ireland, James Campbell, on September 14: “There are certain statements made which I believe are quite untrue, and the result of such an article being published cannot do any good in the country. Would you advise that the Press should be informed that all outside accounts of the Rebellion—or articles connected with it—should be submitted to the Censor before publication?”⁵⁵ The next day, Campbell responded that he thought publication of this article “a very grave offence and one which the Military Authority should at once deal with by the seizure of the printing type and plant of this paper.”⁵⁶ On September 16, the censor took the matter up with the military governor in Ireland, General Maxwell, soliciting his opinion of the article. Like the attorney general, Maxwell adopted a hard line and urged enforcement of martial law: “The publication of the alleged interview in America reprinted from the New York Times is clearly a contravention of Reg. 27 of D. of R. [Defence of the Realm Act]. I would suggest dealing with this case … similar to the ‘Liberator’ of Co. Kerry, i.e., Seize the Plant and enforce a bond for restitution of the Plant and authority to republish the paper.”⁵⁷

Maxwell ultimately decided to back down from seizure of the newspapers and suggested that a strong warning from the censor would be sufficient in dealing with the republication of Kilmer’s article. The censor wrote Tully on September 20, 1916:

I am directed to inform you that the publication of your article “Tales of the Rebellion” purporting to be taken from the “New York Times” and appearing in your issue of 16th September is in contravention of the Defence of the Realm regulations, and I am further instructed to warn you that the publication of Press matter of this description renders your paper liable to suppression under the Defence of the Realm Act. You are advised in future to submit articles of this nature to the Press Censor before publication.⁵⁸

Tully’s next-day response to the warning seemed simultaneously a sincere statement of journalistic concern and a verbal smokescreen of obsequious rhetoric designed to protect his newspapers from government intervention. Given the circumstances of martial law, censorship, and the changing of public opinion after the Rising, the executions, and the arrests, either interpretation could be plausible. Tully wrote: “The article was copied from the ‘New York Times,’ a friendly paper, and it appeared to us to contradict rumours in circulation. If we had any suspicion that there would have been any question raised, we would have sent you the proofs before publishing it. We have no desire to cross the boundary line in these matters.”⁵⁹ Tully, who had lived in America before returning to Ireland to become involved in journalism and politics, was known for his nationalist views, but he split with Parnell and was expelled from the United Irish League in 1903, ending his support for the Irish Party.

Concern over press coverage and the views of Irish America became a preoccupation for British authorities. The New York Times on August 22 relied on a Dublin dispatch from the Manchester Guardian, with the headline “Military Tightens Grip on Ireland,” to report: “Newspapers have been warned that criticism of the Government and of the Administration likely to cause disaffection will not be tolerated.” The same article noted that cracking down on the press co-existed with worry about public opinion and how it was being formed across the Atlantic:

Messages to hand from the United States undoubtedly indicate an unhealthy sentiment among the Irish-American masses. For the moment it would seem as if all the good work of British and Irish statesmen for the last thirty-five years, in removing the root of poisonous bitterness from Anglo-Irish-American relations, had been undone by the recent executions and the collapse of the home rule agreement.⁶⁰

Throughout the Rising and for months afterward, the New York Times played a central role in providing thorough coverage of Ireland, with Kilmer’s feature stories a distinctive element. On its editorial page, however, the newspaper was unwavering in criticizing the rebels and their cause. Even the death sentence pronounced on Casement brought no sympathy on June 30. Instead, under the heading “Vanities of Martyrdom,” there’s an ad hominem onslaught—“How flat and unexciting the universe would be to Sir Roger Casement unless it contained, first, the fact of Sir Roger’s existence, and, second, the fame of his martyrdom!”—as well as a larger judgment: “They will make a ballad of him in Ireland.”⁶¹ But other sections of the paper kept a fuller treatment of conditions and circumstances in Ireland at the forefront of reader concerns. The paper’s Sunday Magazine was particularly noteworthy. From the Sunday immediately after the Rising began (with an article headlined “Ireland’s Sudden Revolt”) through the remainder of 1916—“Bernard Shaw’s Solution of Ireland’s Troubles” came out on November 26—ten major articles appeared. To its credit, the Times Magazine published competing viewpoints. For instance, “Arnold Bennett on the Irish Revolt” (May 28) blamed Irish Americans for incubating, if not instigating, the insurrection and defended Britain (“an assaulted Government has rarely shown greater magnanimity in a more dangerous crisis”), while the already-cited “Roger Casement, Martyr” (August 13) explained its subject without sarcasm or amateur psychoanalysis and with a depth of sympathy that gave human dimension to a complex figure.

How the New York Times covered the Rising proves instructive a century later because of its comprehensiveness. The news and feature pages, notably Kilmer’s interviews, invariably cast a wide net, collecting information of every kind, while the newspaper’s editorial policy remained consistent in reproving the rebels and their cause. In its ambition to be recognized as the nation’s newspaper of record, the Times offered far-ranging coverage of domestic affairs and international concerns, especially matters related to the European war. Events in Ireland, with the early involvement of Germany and the armed hostilities with Britain, were initially viewed as offering a new dimension to a widening conflict. However, with the executions and activities of Irish Americans, a different story line emerged that received full, varied, and serious attention. The Rising and its consequences occurred at a critical moment in the newspaper’s evolution, presenting something of a case study in itself.⁶² With extensive reliance on dispatches and documents that arrived via cable—one writer has estimated that the Times spent $15,000 per week just on cable charges—the newspaper provided its readers with a full picture of events abroad, with a thorough airing of the intricate international angles and their American implications. As a result of such efforts, the Times won the first Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for (in the words of the award committee) “publishing in full so many official reports, documents, and speeches by European statesmen relating to the progress and conduct of the war.”⁶³ The Pulitzer Prize, announced in 1918, recognized the newspaper’s body of journalistic work related to the war.

By providing full and varied coverage, the Times was trying not only to build its reputation in America but also to differentiate its approach from the European press. On April 29, the day of the surrender in Dublin, the “Topics of the Times” column offered a comment on Casement, titled “A Familiar Form of Insanity,” as well as an explanatory defense of the way U.S. newspapers go about their work. The statement endorsed what was available to the U.S. public in forming its opinion while also implying that a complete picture was missing in publications abroad:

American papers, since the war began, have profited from the fact that whatever one Government wanted to suppress or distort another has been eager to give out accurately or to distort the other way. As a result, it has been possible here, sooner or later, to get about all of the news, and, by a little intelligent balancing of it as it comes from the various sources, to present the European situation from day to day far more accurately and fully than has been the case anywhere abroad.⁶⁴

Kilmer’s articles for the Times Magazine helped provide context for readers of the Times, from establishing the role Irish intellectuals played to summarizing what occurred during the Rising and executions, as well as the broader significance. He, of course, was not alone. Indeed, what seems most striking in retrospect is the sheer volume of coverage and the speed with which it influenced public opinion. How The Nation, a serious weekly with a liberal perspective founded in 1865, presented the situation in Ireland is representative of the rapid and mutable response in some American journals at the time. In its May 4 edition, the magazine pulled no punches in its criticism of “The Irish Outbreak”: “That the recent outbreak was so inept as to be almost idiotic must be evident to the minds of all but the Irishmen who took part in it.” At the conclusion of this unsigned editorial commentary, there was a warning similar to the one conveyed by some newspapers at the same time: “If the English are wise, they will not execute the captured rebels, but treat them as amiable and pathetic lunatics mostly in need of restraint and care.”⁶⁵ In its next edition, May 11, the magazine’s editors call the events “the crazy Irish rising,” but now the English were subject to censure for having the rebel leaders face the firing squads in Dublin, noting that “not all things that are lawful are expedient; and we think that time will show the Irish executions to have been a blunder in public policy.”⁶⁶

A week later, the May 18 issue of The Nation published a letter to the editor from William Dean Howells, one of the nation’s most respected literary figures, about the executions. Then seventy-nine years old, Howells wrote with a sense of tempered but pointed outrage:

This was the golden hour for the sort of justice which we misname mercy, this was the moment, not, indeed, wholly to forget the violent madness of the Irish rising, but, above everything, not to overmatch it with the madness of English resentment. The shooting of the Irish insurrectionists is too much like the shooting of prisoners of war, too much like taking a leaf from the German classic of Schrecklichkeit; and in giving way to her vengeance England has roused the moral sense of mankind against her. What a pity, what an infinite pity. She has left us who loved her cause in the war against despotism without another word to say for her until we have first spoken our abhorrence of her inexorable legality in dealing with her Irish prisoners.⁶⁷

For Howells and other American observers, one wrong was trumped by another, more egregious one. As a result, supporting England’s cause in the war became much more difficult. For Woodrow Wilson and his administration, what had happened in Ireland presented a new, potentially volatile issue with a combination of domestic and foreign policy implications.

The Atlantic Monthly, which Howells edited from 1871 until 1881, and an influential national monthly from its founding in 1857, devoted three major articles to the Rising in 1916, including a moving memoir, “Easter,” by James Connolly’s daughter, Nora, in the November issue. However, the most telling, detailed essay, “Sir Roger Casement and Sinn Fein,” was written by British journalist Henry W. Nevinson and appeared in August, the month Casement was executed. A well-known foreign correspondent, Nevinson drew on previous reportorial assignments, during which he spent time with Casement, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington (“the most violent pacifist I have known”), and John McBride (“We execute a worthless rebel, and for Ireland a heroic saint emerges from the felon’s grave”), among others.⁶⁸ Similar to Howells, Nevinson focuses directly on the executions, and given the lead time for a monthly magazine to prepare an issue, he must have composed his assessment almost concurrently with the shootings in Dublin. Their meaning, though, is beyond dispute to this British journalist, explaining the Irish situation to an American audience:

As suppressions of rebellion go, they were not many,—only fifteen,—but . . . they were carried out by driblets; they continued long after the violent danger was over, and for every man shot the ancient rage was rekindled in thousands of hearts. All their errors, all their offenses were forgotten, but the memory of those who “died for Ireland” will be cherished at every fireside. In every cottage, the pictures of “The Fifteen” will be framed upon the walls; and if our Law Courts add Roger Casement as a sixteenth, he will stand in the centre.

“Instead of being regarded as a well-intentioned but crack-brained set of people,” Nevinson concluded, “they will be enshrined under that Necromancy or Magic of the Dead which is both the treasure and the plague of their country.”⁶⁹

For Americans, for all of its complexity, the Irish Question stood out as an international concern, one that brought with it serious doubts about Great Britain and the kind of relationship the United States should have with the British government. Newspapers, magazines, and by the end of the year books kept the Rising in the American consciousness for the public’s attention. What had happened three thousand or so miles away was more than a provincial preoccupation within the Irish-American community. The state of Ireland and the struggle for independence the rebels represented forced themselves on America’s agenda, partly because U.S. citizens had access to information from a variety of different sources, both domestic and international, that people in Ireland and Britain never saw.

In his memoir about Kilmer, Robert Holliday says of his friend: “It is not at all improbable that had he been an Irishman born and resident in Ireland he would have been among the martyrs of Easter Week.”⁷⁰ Kilmer kept returning to the Rising and the divisions it deepened in his work as a journalist, poet, and editor. In an unpublished article, “Irish-American Opinion on the Home Rule Deadlock,” which is among his papers at Georgetown, Kilmer used Woodrow Wilson’s speech of April 2, 1917, that asked for a declaration of war against Germany as both his lead and springboard for a consideration of Ireland’s fate nearly one year after the Rising. “In the Message which made the United States a factor in the War against Germany, the Message which will send young men from Maine, California, and all the states of the Union to the trenches in France, President Wilson declared that the Nation was to fight ‘for the rights of nations, great and small, and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience.’ ” Kilmer argued that Americans believe Ireland deserve the same rights. “This seems to us to be a thing so obvious that we can regard the recurrent obstructions to its fulfillment only with angry amazement. There are, so far as I know, only two opinions on the subject held by Americans—one, that Ireland should be a free and independent nation, and the other, that Ireland should enjoy the advantages of such Home Rule as is now possessed by Canada and Australia.”⁷¹

Kilmer developed his argument over sixteen typed and quotation-laden pages. In the final paragraph, he looked beyond the war to its aftermath: “When the peace terms are being decided, there is no doubt that America’s voice will speak resolutely and clearly on the side of Ireland. But the matter, America believes, should be settled before then, should be settled at once, so that Germany may be opposed by a union of nations of which every one honestly practices democracy.”⁷²

The article seems to have been written at the request of the editor of Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, published by the Ireland province of Jesuit priests, where Kilmer had contributed a poem, “Father Gerard Hopkins, S.J.,” in March of 1916. Given Kilmer’s full-throated support of Ireland’s rights as a small nation, it is quite possible Studies was reluctant to provide him with a platform on Irish soil at a critical moment during the Great War. Though Studies might have deliberately tried to avoid controversy or possible censorship by printing Kilmer’s essay—a search of the journal’s archives revealed no correspondence about the article—he remained active in the U.S. publishing world as U.S. entry into the war approached. In 1917, aside from bringing out his collection Main Street and Other Poems, which included “Easter Week” and “Apology,” he published Dreams and Images: An Anthology of Catholic Poets. Among the eighty-six contributors are Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hillaire Belloc, John Henry Newman, Katherine Tynan—as well as MacDonagh, Pearse, and Plunkett. In Kilmer’s editorial judgment, poets didn’t just march “in the Van of Irish Revolt”; they left behind verse worthy of consideration by future generations. Subsequent editions of the collection—retitled Joyce Kilmer’s Anthology of Catholic Poets and doubling the number of contributors—retained the selections by the three leaders of the Rising. The volume remains in print today.

Kilmer, however, wasn’t content to stand or sit on the sidelines, wrestling only with words. Immediately after the United States declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917, and with four children at home, he enlisted in the military. “He hated many things, but I believe that of all things he hated most a pacifist—a pacifist in anything,” Holliday wrote of Kilmer. “He believed in the nobility of war and the warrior’s calling, so long as the cause was holy, or believed to be holy. As he saw it, there was no question as to his duty.”⁷³ This sense of duty co-existed with his reverence for freedom and his abhorrence of tyranny, which he had addressed in “Apology.”

Initially part of the National Guard of New York, Kilmer requested a transfer to the 165th Infantry Regiment, which earlier was widely known as the “Fighting Sixty-Ninth” and was predominantly composed of Irish Americans from New York. Before shipping off to the front lines in France at the end of October 1917, he wrote a priest-friend (of which he had many): “The people I like best here are the wild Irish—boys of eighteen or twenty, who left Ireland a few years ago, some of them to escape threatened conscription, and travelled about the country in gangs, generally working on the railroads. They have delightful songs that have never been written down, but sung in vagabonds’ camps and country jails.”⁷⁴ Kilmer’s choice of companions—the newest generation of “exiled children”—says much about him and his appreciation of Irish culture at whatever level of station or status. Whatever his own ancestral heritage, he felt right at home within the circle of his regiment.

First assigned to be a statistician and later as an intelligence observer, Kilmer got promoted from private to sergeant, but refused to be considered for a higher rank—“I’d rather be a Sergeant in the 69th than a Lieutenant in any other regiment in the world.”⁷⁵ Despite the rigors of his duties in France, Kilmer continued to write when he had a free or idle moment. The most memorable work of prose that he composed at the front is a sketch about his experience and the camaraderie he shared with others in his regiment. He called it simply “Holy Ireland.” One of the five poems he wrote during his service is titled “When the Sixty-Ninth Comes Back,” and it features these lines:

God rest our valiant leaders dead, whom we cannot

forget;

They’ll see the Fighting Irish are the Fighting

Irish yet.⁷⁶

The Sixty-Ninth (or 165th Infantry) did come back—but without Kilmer. A bullet to the head from a German sniper took his life on July 30, 1918, near the French village of Seringe-et-Nesles, and he was buried in the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery close by. Kilmer’s death was major news back home, especially in the literary world. The New York Sun referred to him as “the first of our well-known poets to fall since America entered the war.”⁷⁷ England had already experienced the emotion of losing a noted poet in the Great War, a passing Kilmer lamented in his poem “In Memory of Rupert Brooke.” Now the United States had to deal with a similar literary loss. The Brooklyn Eagle noted, “The Gael’s warm blood ran in his veins, the Gael’s vivid imagination thrilled him, yet in what he wrote and what he did there was the evidence of Saxon restraint, sanity, almost coldness of purpose.”⁷⁸

The Literary Digest, Poetry, and many newspaper book sections devoted pages to remembrances and original poems to mark Kilmer’s death. The French awarded him the Croix de Guerre, and the British Ministry of Information released a lengthy tribute, which the New York Times published in full on October 27. Calling him “one of America’s best-loved poets, a devout Christian gentleman, a loyal patriot, and a sincere craftsman,” the governmental encomium offered three reasons why Kilmer didn’t need to go off to war: “He was above the draft age, he had the responsibility of a wife and children, and his vocation as a newspaper man was generally held to be an essential occupation.” The statement complimented “the Christian knight” and celebrated certain poems, including “The White Ships and the Red” about the sinking of the Lusitania as “one of the most righteous outpourings of wrath against the barbarism of the German methods.” Predictably, perhaps, at no place in the tribute is there mention of Kilmer’s putative Irishness, his writings about the Easter Rising, or his devotion to “the Fighting Irish” who were his comrades in arms.⁷⁹

British interest in Kilmer didn’t end with his death. In 1941, Duckworth, a respected British publisher for much of the twentieth century, brought out Trees and Other Poems. The unsigned “Publisher’s Note” argued that Kilmer’s work transcended his time and contemporary circumstances. Noting that the book was appearing with “the continent of Europe once more darkened by war,” it noted Kilmer’s enthusiasm for the English literary tradition, arguing that “there was no more sincere admirer than he of the glorious cavalcade of English poets, from Milton down to Hilaire Belloc and Rupert Brooke (for whom he wrote an epitaph, included in this book).”⁸⁰ Like the Ministry of Information statement, this collection of thirty-three poems avoids any mention of the Easter Rising or Kilmer’s association with the Irish or Irish America. The British seemed willing to adopt him as one of their own as long as it was on their terms. While it noted that Kilmer had displayed a “passionate belief in the sanctity of personal freedom,” one specific allegiance is avoided.

Americans, on the other hand, never forgot how much the Irish cause of independence and the larger significance of Ireland meant to one of his country’s most famous casualties of the Great War. Holliday’s two-volume, 561-page set of Kilmer’s poetry and prose appeared in late 1918, sold out its first printing in three days, was quickly reissued, and came out four other times during the next half-century. Kilmer’s poems about the Rising are included in the first volume, and “Holy Ireland,” considered by critics the most accomplished prose composition of Kilmer’s career, leads off Volume Two. When the 165th Infantry Regiment finally returned to America in the spring of 1919, they marched up New York’s Fifth Avenue with the band playing “When the Sixty-Ninth Comes Back.” Victor Herbert, the well-known Irish-born composer and first president of the Friends of Irish Freedom, had turned Kilmer’s words into the lyrics of this new song. The cover of the musical score notes that “Lieut. Victor Herbert has waived his royalties on this song in behalf of Mrs. Joyce Kilmer.”⁸¹ In death, as in life, Kilmer continued to be remembered by Irish Americans and others working to achieve independence for Ireland.

At the end of 1919, the regiment’s Catholic chaplain published Father Duffy’s Story: A Tale of Humor and Heroism, Of Life and Death with the Fighting Sixty-Ninth. In the preface, Francis P. Duffy notes, “Joyce Kilmer was to have written this book.”⁸² As it turned out, the twenty or so pages that Kilmer found time to draft appear as a “Historical Appendix.” Trying to explain “the psychology of the 69th New York,” the poet-historian quotes G. K. Chesterton’s “Ballad of the White Horse”:

For the great Gaels of Ireland

Are the men that God made mad

For all their wars are merry

And all their songs are sad.⁸³

Alas, all the wars of self-adopted Gaels weren’t merry. In Kilmer’s case, he never saw the consequences of the Rising that so absorbed him in 1916. In Father Duffy’s Story, the chaplain records in his diary for May 15, 1918, what might serve as a coda about the figure called in the headline of one obituary the “Hero Soldier-Poet”: “Kilmer or I, or both of us, may see an end to life in this war, but neither of us will be able to say that life has not been good to us.”⁸⁴ Duffy, who died in 1932, and Kilmer were reunited cinematically in the 1940 movie The Fighting 69th, which dramatized for a mass audience Irish-American valor and patriotism during the Great War, just as the United States faced possible involvement in the new European conflict that had begun a year earlier. In New York City, both the chaplain and the writer are remembered more permanently with monuments: an eight-foot-high statue of Francis Duffy stands imposingly in front of a much larger Celtic cross in Duffy Square, the northernmost portion of Times Square, while Kilmer is the namesake for a park in the Bronx and a triangle in Brooklyn. In addition, a plaque in Central Park reads:

In Memoriam

Sergeant Joyce Kilmer

Poet of the Trees

Killed in Action—Bois Colas

July 30, 1918

The “Poet of the Trees” was no less the poet for Ireland’s exiled children. Kilmer’s adopted ethnic identity infused and animated his life and work, and the Easter Rising provided a vicarious prelude to the actual battles he would later fight, side by side, with his fellow “exiled children.” His belief in freedom, devotion to the religion of his conversion, and a commitment to writing, both serious and popular, defined a career that ended long before Kilmer and his admirers might have hoped. Yet how he responded to events in Ireland during 1916 continues to guide Americans (as well as others) toward a better understanding of what happened and what it meant, without the constraints of censorship or the fog of war.