In August 1914, more than two and a half years before the United States entered World War I, poet Alan Seeger joined the French Foreign Legion and took up a post on the Western Front. The New York native wrote several works over the next two years including “Ode in Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen for France,” but he is best known for “I Have a Rendezvous With Death,” a haunting poem that describes a meeting with a personified Death, “At some disputed barricade / When Spring comes back with rustling shade.” Seeger’s own rendezvous with death came on July 4, 1916, when he was mortally wounded in the stomach during an assault on the French village of Belloy-en-Santerre. His only collections of poems debuted the following year, and he’s since become one of the war’s most widely quoted American writers. One notable admirer was President John F. Kennedy, who supposedly listed “Rendezvous” among his favorite poems.
