SOURCE: "Meter-Rattling," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. CII, No. 1, Winter, 1994, pp. 148-52.

In the following essay, a review of The Poems of General George S. Patton, Jr., Kennedy observes that the poems engender an effect quite different from that which their author might have imagined.

From Richard M. Nixon's favorite movie, Patton, millions first became aware that Old Blood-and-Guts, conqueror of North Africa, Sicily, and the Rhine, had written verse. This devotion to such an outmoded pasttime was made to seem part of the general's quaint and old-fangled character, a throwback to days of chivalry. High-handedly the scriptwriter Francis Ford Coppola extracted eight lines from a 96-line poem and had Patton (George C. Scott) declaim them to Omar Bradley (Karl Maiden), his second-in-command in Tunisia, while the two strolled a Carthaginian battlefield complete with ruined arch:

 Through the travail of the ages
 Midst the pomp and toil of...