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. (Spring 2006)Book Description
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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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
These fascinating poems... put into sharp relief America's complex, conflicted, and evolving attitudes toward war.
(Ploughshares 11/1/2006)A sterling collection of verse from the colonial wars to today.
(VVA Veteran 31 - 2006)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 )
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A VERY COMPREHENSIVE COLLECTION.,
This review is from: American War Poetry: An Anthology (Hardcover)
This is a very well done and well organized anthology of war poetry by American authors. The poems presented here come from a number of sources; those who actually participated in war and those how did not. Some of the works are highly patriotic, others bring the reader face to face with the reality of war as seen through the eyes of the men who were actually there. A few of the poems could be classified as strictly propaganda while others have no particular agenda what so ever, other than to tell a story, express emotions and always, one way or another, to inform.
The editor, Lorrie Goldensohn has arraigned this work in chronological order, beginning with the "Indian Wars." and the first work is "Bars Fight," which addressed a poem based on a battle fought in 1746. We have a sampling of poems form the Colonial Wars, Revolutionary War, War of 1812, The Mexican-American War , Civil War, Indian Wars, (Note here that represent the Native American point of view are well represented in this work), Spanish-American War, War of the Philippines, World War I, The Spanish Civil War (Yes, we had quite a number of American involved in that one too), World War II, Vietnam War, El Salvador, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf. History through the eyes of the poet, no doubt...what better way to learn? Some of the authors and their works are known; well known, while other are from such individuals as "Anonymous." Over half of the poets are what you would call "unknown," or just soldiers and sailors who found themselves caught up in the madness of war. We have work from such diverse poets as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Robert Bly, Thoreau, Hemingway, Elizabeth Bishop and many, many other well known writers. All of the works chosen here though are striking in their emotional appeal; if "appeal" is the correct word. Ms. Goldensohn has given us a very nice short biography of each of the writers (when known) and introduced each section with a short history of the war involved. The technical quality of the works chosen varies, as it should, from great on down. That aspect of these works is up to the reader's individual taste. Whether or not the pieces is technically "correct" or not is rather moot though in this case as that is not the reason for the selection of these poems. This is one of the better anthologies of war poetry I have run across...and there are many. I say this primarily because so much ground is covered and the way the editor has arraigned these works gives the reader a very good overview of our wars, changes in our outlook and attitude. Most importantly though, she has picked works that truly give us a looked into the deepest and darkest part of many, many men. Many of these works are absolutely haunting. Don Blankenship The Ozarks
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good Anthology,
By
This review is from: American War Poetry: An Anthology (Hardcover)
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.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
poignant way to think about war,
By
This review is from: American War Poetry: An Anthology (Hardcover)
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.
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