Product Description

American War Poetry spans the 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 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #194804 in Books
• Published on: 2006-02-16
• Released on: 2006-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 448 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Riches abound in this stylistically varied anthology. Arranged by war, the book begins with the Colonial period and proceeds through Whitman admiring Civil War soldiers crossing a river to end with Brian Turner, who published his first book in 2005, beckoning a bullet in contemporary Iraq. Many voices, by turns elegiac, outraged, rhetorical and ecstatic are represented, including Sitting Bull's pithy and mournful final song, Charles Simic's haunted memories of learning chess in 1944 and Walter Macdonald's disconcerting comparison between trucking pigs and flying soldiers to Vietnam. The difficulty, as with any anthology, is in the criteria for inclusion and exclusion. Goldensohn acknowledges her need to include some poems whose historical merits outweigh their literary ones. And one interesting omission-interesting because perhaps it doesn't exist-is any pro-war poetry from the second half of the 20th century. But to be able to compare across time, flipping back and forth, for instance, between Marianne Moore's response to WWII ("There never was a war that was / not inward; I must / fight till I have conquered in myself what / causes war") and Galway Kinnell's time-stopping rendering of the fall of the Twin Towers ("each light, / each life, put out, lies down within us") is to approach the heart of American, or maybe any, war poetry.
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Review
"These fascinating poems... put into sharp relief America's complex, conflicted, and evolving attitudes toward war." -- Ploughshares "A sterling collection of verse from the colonial wars to today." -- VVA Veteran "Original and significant." -- readysteadybook.com "[ American War Poetry] offers the works of nearly 200 of America's greatest poets." -- Library Journal "This unique, remarkable anthology of war poetry embraces every major conflict of the US... Essential." -- Choice " American War Poetry is an essential anthology for these times, as well as one that will hold up well long after." -- Kathleen Rooney, Harvard Review

About the Author
Lorrie Goldensohn is most recently the author of Dismantling Glory: Twentieth-Century 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.

Customer Reviews

poignant way to think about war
There are many good ways to try to understand humanity's dark impulse to slaughter each other in war. When I was thirteen my grandmother took me to Washington, DC in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War. I still remember the sights and sounds of protest. Later I visited the War Memorial commemorating that war and watched as visitors groped along the wall to identify the name of a loved one. In 1995 our family stood on the streets of downtown Moscow while a military parade celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II (which claimed the lives of some 50 million Russians). Our family has also appreciated the oral history provided by my wife's stepfather who fought with the "greatest generation." I have also benefited from reading histories written by experts long after a war ended, those written while battles still raged (cf. Iraq), and autobiographical accounts written by soldiers (Jarhead). Everyone, in my opinion, should read Chris Hedges's masterpiece War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.

Thanks to Lorrie Goldensohn, we can now try to understand war through poetry. About half of the 232 poems in this book were written by war participants. She has arranged the poems in chronological order by the poet's date of birth, grouping them according to specific wars (Colonial Wars, Revolutionary Wars, War of 1812, etc.). The poems begin with skirmishes with Indians in 1746 and end with insurgents in Iraq. Each section begins with a brief description of the war and its social context. Brief biographies of the poets (pp. 367-404) humanize them even more. These war poems written across nearly 300 years explore almost every human emotion you might imagine--pride and patriotism, propaganda and protest, victory and defeat, bravery and fear, death and mutilation, glorious triumphs and depressing futility, so-called "good" wars like World War II and "bad" wars like Vietnam. Contrary to the misconception that poetry is unrelated to "real" life, Goldensohn documents the efforts of poets interacting with the greatest of human tragedies.

Good Anthology
A topical and very good anthology of poems by American writers about war. The editor has striven for a balance of covering all significant American wars, significant American poets, and representative works, even in cases where the quality is not great. The selection is very good with a lot of fine and some outstanding poets. Included are some famous and some obscure works. Most interesting is the marked increase in the number of quality poems that comes with the 20th century. There are certainly some great 19th century war poems, notably the work of Whitman, but much of what is presented from the 19th century is second rate though of considerable historic interest. The 20th century, however, sees the work of many fine American poets.