Ebel's analyses of poetry

Early on, Ebel acknowledges that appealing to the poetry composed by soldiers during the First World War may strike some of his readers as strange, and that the poems in Stars and Stripes were not likely to be raw repudiations of war. It is at once consistent with Ebel's stated intentions and a disservice that, when he considers a poem crafted with above-average care and talent (Alan Seeger's "I Have a Rendezvous with Death"), Ebel analyzes it with the same relentless determination to garner psychological insight as he does the other poems, neglecting some of the ambiguity in Seeger's work. (81-82) But when Ebel takes up poems that might charitably be characterized as primarily historical in value, he occasionally permits himself an adverse aesthetic judgment (e.g., page 25, last paragraph). It is not quite scholarly objectivity to ride over aesthetic merit and poetic ambiguity when they are present but to mock poems that lack both. At the same time, Ebel seems quite right to call attention to a form of expression that found broader application at the time than a present-day reader might expect. Would a computerized, statistical analysis of the frequency of certain substantives (e.g., "the Father," "the Son," "crucifixion," "the Cross") and their coincidence in poems with other selected words (e.g., "hero," "to purify") have helped Ebel remain consistently indifferent to aesthetics? Given the relatively short publication run of Stars and Stripes, feeding all of the poems it published into a database would seem to be a manageable task. In fact, the Library of Congress has already done the hard part.

As an aside, did anyone else catch any analysis on Ebel's part of the quasi-pagan (more specifically, traditional Roman) tropes that crop up in the poetry and other reflections of the soldiers (e.g., page 154, first paragraph)? If Ebel delves into such analysis, I must have read right past it, but I'd have been interested to see what he made of it. I doubt that any of the soldiers would have consciously identified as traditional Roman pagans, but sometimes their commitment to Christian orthodoxy seems equally doubtful.