author
Arch Alfred McKillen
b. 1914
A wartime poet with a remarkably direct voice, this little-known writer drew on Navy service at Pearl Harbor and life after the war to write about conflict, love, and loneliness. His surviving work feels personal, clear, and quietly intense.
1 Audiobook
The Death of the Scharnhorst, and Other Poems
by Arch Alfred McKillen
About the author
Born in 1914, Arch Alfred McKillen is remembered as an American poet whose life seems to have been shaped by war and its aftermath. Available library and public-domain records show that he served in the United States Navy after enlisting in 1939 and was aboard the USS Tennessee at Pearl Harbor during the attack of December 7, 1941.
After the war, he became a bookseller and continued writing poetry. The main work that can be readily confirmed today is The Death of the Scharnhorst, and Other Poems, published by Vantage Press in 1952, a collection that brings together poems about war alongside poems of love and social feeling.
Reliable online sources agree on the broad outline of his life, including dates often given as 1914 to 1984, but detailed biographical information appears to be scarce. What stands out most is the writing itself: poetry rooted in lived experience, shaped by wartime memory, and notable for its plainspoken emotional force.