Alan Seeger

Alan Seeger (1888–1916) was an American poet born in New York City and educated at Harvard. Living in Paris when the First World War broke out, he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion rather than wait for the United States to enter the war. He was killed in action at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, days after his twenty-eighth birthday; his poem "I Have a Rendezvous with Death," written shortly before his death, became one of the best-known poems of the war.