continued from front flap
many familiar poems of patriotic ardor have been chosen, other poems show a steady interest in antiwar themes. Lorrie Goldensohn provides a brief biography for each poet and places each poem in its proper literary and historical context. Comprehensive and compelling, American War Poetry not only documents the birth and development of a national style of expression but shows the force of poetry working on the historical moment, making it come vitally alive.
Lorrie Goldensohn is most recently the author of Dismantling Glory: TwentiethCentury Soldier Poetry, which was nominated for the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award. Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry received a nomination for a Pulitzer Prize in 1990. Her poetry and critical essays have appeared in journals and periodicals since 1965.
American War Poetry spans the
“American War Poetry is an original and unprecedented event, assembling the poetry of war from the birth of the republic to the present imperial quest, and in reading this formidable symphony of utterance one cannot but admire the vision, critical acumen, and scholarly rigor that brought so necessary a book into being. Lorrie Goldensohn has given us an immense gift.” —Carolyn Forché
am e r i can war poetry
Poets Include: Elizabeth Bishop Robert Bly Joseph Brodsky Gwendolyn Brooks Stephen Crane E. E. Cummings Emily Dickinson T. S. Eliot Ralph Waldo Emerson Louise Erdrich Martin Espada
Robert Frost Ernest Hemingway Langston Hughes Galway Kinnell Denise Levertov Philip Levine Robert Lowell J. D. McClatchy W. S. Merwin Edna St. Vincent Millay Marianne Moore
Sharon Olds Ezra Pound Adrienne Rich Carl Sandburg Charles Simic Sitting Bull Wallace Stevens Henry David Thoreau Robert Penn Warren Phillis Wheatley Walt Whitman
columbia university press new york
www.columbia.edu/cu/cup
american war poetry
D
Goldensohn
an anthology
jack et image: Troops Awaiting Helicopter Transport, Vietnam War. © Tim Page/Corbis
jack et design: Chang Jae Lee
Edited by
pr inted in the u.s.a.
Lorrie Goldensohn
9!BME=H<:PR POS!
ISBN 0-231-13310-3
columbia
history of the nation. Beginning with the Colonial Wars of the eighteenth century and ending with the Gulf Wars, this original and significant anthology presents four centuries of American men and women—soldiers, nurses, reporters, and embattled civilians— writing about war. American War Poetry opens with a ballad by a freed African American slave, commenting on a skirmish with Indians in a Massachusetts meadow. Poems on the American Revolution follow, as well as poems on “minor” conflicts like the Mexican War and the Spanish-American Wars. This compact anthology has generous selections on the Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, and the Vietnamese-American War, but it also includes an unusually large offering on American participation in the Spanish Civil War. Another section covers four hundred years of conflict with Native Americans, ending with poems by contemporary Indians who respond passionately and directly to their difficult history. The collection also reaches into current reaction to American involvement in Latin America, Bosnia, and the Gulf Wars. Showing the depth of feeling and the range of thinking with which Americans have confronted war, American War Poetry expands our sense of what poetry is made to do. While the birth of a national identity is documented in early poems, the anthology also conveys the growing sophistication of a uniquely American style. Although early war poems show that the first justification for war was purely defensive, as American global ambitions matured, American writers moved increasingly to deplore a homegrown imperialism and its terrible costs. While
continued on back flap