American War Poetry

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.

The horrors of the First World War released a great outburst of emotional poetry from the soldiers who fought in it as well as many other giants of world literature. Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke and W B Yeats are just some of the poets whose work is featured in this anthology. The raw emotion unleashed in these poems still has the power to move readers today. As well as poems detailing the miseries of war there are poems on themes of bravery, friendship and loyalty, and this collection shows how even in the depths of despair the human spirit can still triumph.

A superb selection of poems from both sides of the American Civil War features more than 75 inspired works by Melville, Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Whitman, and many others.

Acclaimed poet and World War II veteran Shapiro's pathbreaking gathering of work by more than 60 poets of the war years includes Randall Jarrell, Anthony Hecht, George Oppen, Richard Eberhart, William Bronk, and Woody Guthrie.

Begun by poet Sam Hamill in reaction to an invitation to attend First Lady Laura Bush's White House Symposium "Poetry and the American Voice" on February 12, 2003 (subsequently canceled), site contains poems or personal statements from over 4,600 poets to register their opposition to the Bush administration's policies toward war in Iraq. Allows for the submission of new poems and also provides links to anti-war activities, news items and other anti-war organizations.

Deeply affecting and diverse in perspective, The Poetry of the American Civil War is the first comprehensive volume to focus entirely on poetry written and published during the Civil War. Of the nearly one thousand books of poetry published in the 1860s, some two hundred addressed the war in some way, and these collectively present a textured portrait of life during the conflict. The poets represented here hail from the North and the South, and at times mirror each other uncannily. Among them are housewives, doctors, preachers, bankers, journalists, and teachers. Their verse reflects the day-to-day reality of war, death, and destruction, and it contemplates questions of faith, slavery, society, patriotism, and politics. This is an essential volume for poetry lovers, historians, and Civil War enthusiasts alike.

Mainstream American poetry of the 1950s has long been dismissed as deliberately indifferent to its cultural circumstances. In this penetrating study, Edward Brunner breaks the placid surface of the hollow decade to reveal a poetry sharply responsive to issues of its time. Cold War Poetry considers the fifties poem as part of a dual cultural project: as proof of the competency of the newly professionalized poet and as a user-friendly way of initiating a newly educated, upwardly mobile postwar audience into high culture. Brunner revisits Richard Wilbur, Randall Jarrell, and other acknowledged leaders of the period as well as neglected writers such as Rosalie Moore, V. R. Lang, Katherine Hoskins, Melvin B. Tolson, and Hyam Plutzik. He also examines the one-sided authority of the (male-dominated) book review process, the ostracizing of female and minority poets, poetic fads such as the ubiquitous sestina, and the power of the classroom anthology to establish criteria for reading. Attributing the gradual change in poetic style during the 1950s to the slow collapse of the authority of the state, Brunner shows how a secretive, anxious poetics developed in the shadow of a disabled government. He recontextualizes the much-maligned domestic verse of the 1950s, reading its shift toward the private sphere and the recurrent image of the child as a reflection of the powerlessness of the post-nuclear citizen. Through a close examination of poetry written about the Bomb, he delineates how poets registered their growing sense of cosmic disorder in coded language, resorting to subterfuge to continue their critique in the face of sanctions levied against those who questioned government policies. Brilliantly decoding the politics embedded in the poetry of an ostensibly apolitical time, Cold War Poetry provides a powerful rereading of a pivotal decade.

A selection of poetry written during World War I. In the introduction Jon Silkin traces the changing mood of the poets - from patriotism through anger and compassion to an active desire for social change. The book includes work by Sassoon, Owen, Blunden, Rosenberg, Hardy and Lawrence.

Focusing on literary and popular poets, as well as work by women, African Americans, and soldiers, this book considers how writers used poetry to articulate their relationships to family, community, and nation during the Civil War. Faith Barrett suggests that the nationalist "we" and the personal "I" are not opposed in this era; rather they are related positions on a continuous spectrum of potential stances. For example, while Julia Ward Howe became famous for her "Battle Hymn of the Republic," in an earlier poem titled "The Lyric I" she struggles to negotiate her relationship to domestic, aesthetic, and political stances. Barrett makes the case that Americans on both sides of the struggle believed that poetry had an important role to play in defining national identity. She considers how poets created a platform from which they could speak both to their own families and local communities and to the nations of the Confederacy, the Union, and the United States. She argues that the Civil War changed the way American poets addressed their audiences and that Civil War poetry changed the way Americans understood their relationship to the nation.

Contains a collection of poetry that spans two centuries and provides a diverse point of view of American life. American Poetry offers a collection of 26 verses by our finest poets, all with their unique perspective on the land they loved and accompanied by remarkable paintings that enhance the meaning of the words. Here, beautifully illustrated, are such unforgettable works.