Home > World War I > Alan Seeger Biography

June 28, 1888
New York City, New York
July 4, 1916
Belloy-en-Santerre, France

Poet, soldier

American poet Alan Seeger is best remembered for "I Have a Rendezvous with Death," a poem that foreshadowed Seeger's death in battle during World War I. Seeger lived a bohemian (unconventional) lifestyle in New York's Greenwich Village before moving to France in 1912. When war broke out in 1914, he was one of the first Americans to enlist in the French Foreign Legion (a branch of the French military open to foreigners). In letters to his family and to American periodicals, he expressed the idealism and courage of many young men of his generation who answered the call of duty in World War I. On the Fourth of July 1916, nearly a year before the United States entered the war, came Seeger's own death, as he fell in battle while trying to liberate a French village from the Germans. A...