Poets of World War II

by Various and Harvey Shapiro

Book Overview

This anthology brings together 120 poems about World War II by 62 American poets, chosen, as editor Harvey Shapiro writes in his introduction, "with a purpose: to demonstrate that the American poets... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1931082332
• ISBN13: 9781931082334
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: Library of America
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 4.7" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Poets of World War II (American Poets Project)

Out of the murderous, dehumanizing hell of the war were born powerful, often graceful and miraculous works of art full of passion, pain, loneliness, and ultimately proof that each poet survived with a sense of dignity and integrity. Poets served on the ground, in the air over Europe and Japan, and in ships on every ocean. And in providing a strong, coherent, pacifist yet patriotic perspective on the home front in that "Good War", poets such as John Berryman contribute their works as well.

WONDERFUL ADDITION TO A WONDERFUL SERIES

This little volume is one of twenty seven volumes published so far by the Library of America and aptly named The American Poets Project. These publications are attempting to collect, present and a collection of the most significant American poetry of the many distinguished poets of our country, and so far they have done a wonderful job with this endeavor. This series is quickly becoming one of my favorite. Poets of World War II has gleaned through and gathered the works of 62 American poets and presented us with 120 poems; the centrally theme being World War II. The mix and representation in this work is good. While the vast majority of the poems featured here are from poets who actually experienced combat, there is also a good representation from those who did not which include those who chose not to serve, some who had loved ones that did and everything in between. While volumes upon volumes of poetry inspired by World War I are available, World War II has been by comparison, overlooked to a great extent. The reader of this collection will be struck instantly by the change in attitude, ambiance and general outlook of this generation compared to the Previous. War is war and it is an ugly thing in everyway. Poems of the writers here reflect a much more pragmatic outlook, a harsher and less romantic view than many of the poems of previous wars. Many of these works have sharp twists of irony interwoven in their lines; a bitterness, yet in many cases, a bitterness mixed with pride and always, an amazement. The poets here are some of the best of their generation and era. Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Conrad Aiken, Vladimir Nabokov, Eve Triem, Lincoln Kirsten, Woody Guthrie, John Frederick Nims, Howard Nemerov and Alfred Hayes are but a partial list of poets whose names appear. The works here represent many attitudes and observations. From the cutting irony of Lincoln Kristein's "Rank," and "Snatch," to the sheer terror of John Frederick Nims "Shot Down at Night.'' to William Bronk's "Soldiers in Death," the full gambit of war time experiences are exposed. We have the horror well represented of course, the death, pain, mass destruction along with the mind numbing fear, but also examined in a rather brutal but whimsical way, the visit to a house of prostitution by soldiers just off the front line. The poetry of war is not to the taste of all, but the subject matter here which is war, brings out the full array of human emotion (or in some cases the lack of), and digs deep into the very soul of those who where involved; those who were witnesses. There will be very little argument over the quality of the writing here no matter what the style used in each separate poem. These writers are the best of the best and most have or had cut their literary teeth in other genre. I cannot say that this is a pleasant read; a fun read, but it is certainly a worthwhile read and as we seem to be stuck in a perpetual cycle of war, it is quite likely a

Still a connection

I am using this collection in my American Lit survey class to cover WWII, and it's tremendously effective. I'm having my students choose a poem and read it and discuss it in class, and I believe they are finding the experience very moving. To them as well as to me, WWII is history, the past, but close enough to seem real.

Powerful

This anthology is one in a series published by the American Poets Project, an effort intended to produce a first-time "compact national library of poets" (back cover). The volume under review here consists of 120 poems by 62 poets, where 42 are veterans, the others non-veterans, thus making it similar in concept to kindred anthologies such as Jan Barry's 'Peace is Our Profession: Poems and Passages of War Protest' (1981). As such, it includes works by conscientious objectors and other war-resisters such as Robinson Jeffers and William Stafford. All the contributors are a credible collection of Objectivists, Imagists, "followers of the formal school of Southern verse and dense rhetoric..." (xxxii). The editor is Harvey Shapiro, an Ivy League-educated poet, and veteran of thirty-five combat missions as a B-17 tail gunner. He sets a solemn tone for the volume, stating that although the Allies were victorious, "the sight of dead bodies is scattered among these poems the way bodies were washed up on the shores of invasion beaches..." (xix). Moreover, his purpose for this anthology is "to demonstrate that the American poets of this war produced a body of work that has not yet been recognized for its clean and powerful eloquence" (xx). Shapiro gathers some of the best poetry of the war. Included are those infrequently published but no less majestically poignant air war poems by John Ciardi, James Dickey, Richard Eberhart, Richard Hugo (though his opus magnum, 'Mission to Linz', does not appear here), Randall Jarrell, and Howard Nemerov. Some of the best poems of ground combat are by Louis Simpson, George Oppen, and Anthony Hecht. Several poems are quite moving, such as James Tate's 'The Lost Pilot' (218-220), written for his father who was killed in action when Tate was five months old, and Peter Viereck's 'Vale from Carthage' (110-111), which Viereck wrote on the occasion of his brother's death in the European theater. There are sublime elegies like Vladimir Nabokov's "When he was small, when he would fall" (20), and Richard Eberhart's 'A Ceremony by the Sea' (31-34). Many poets achieve a powerful austerity through just a few lines, such as Samuel Menashe does in his 18-syllable, 5-line poem, 'Beachhead' (214). Yet, the poems here are not solely about combat and its affects, for they also inform the wider ontology of war, verse that emerges into the foreground of military victory to ask the unanswered questions of race and class. Compelling examples are Witter Bynner's 'Defeat', and Gwendolyn Brook's 'Negro Hero' (1, 115). For enthusiasts of poetry and studies of how war relates to literature and the arts, Shapiro's book proves an exemplary and diverse collection, and a perfect companion to Leon Stokesbury's 'Articles of War: A Collection of American Poetry About World War II' (1990). It includes an Introduction by Shapiro, and a very helpful biographical notes section. There has always been a debate over how poetry can close the ae