Second War World Poems is a powerful anthology of poetry from the 1939-45 conflict. It includes verse written by servicemen who participated in the War - Keith Douglas, Alun Lewis, Randall Jarrell - as well as by survivors of the concentration camps like Primo Levi and Paul Celan. It also includes poetry by civilians in London, Warsaw, Moscow and New York, and by writers dealing with the terrifying legacy of the conflict and its aftermath.
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.
A collection of short poems about the author's time as a soldier in World War II. The author was born in New Jersey in 1925 and has lived in New York's Greenwich Village since 1952. He started writing poetry at age 75.
Poems From the Second World War is a moving and powerful collection of poems written by soldiers, nurses, mothers, sweethearts, and family and friends who experienced WWII from different standpoints. The Imperial War Museum was founded in 1917 to collect and display material relating to World War I, which was still being fought. Today IWM is unique in its coverage of conflicts, especially those involving Britain and the Commonwealth, from World War I to the present. They seek to provide for, and to encourage, the study and understanding of the history of modern war and wartime experience.
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.
Howard Nemerov has written often about wars great and small, the overtly political and the deeply personal. But only with the passage of time, a heightening of technique and deepening of insight, has he been able to write from his experience in World War II as he does here, where historical past and personal history finally dovetail. From "The War in the Heavens" to "The War in the Streets," Nemerov chronicles with devastating grace the harrowing of life. "These new poems of Howard Nemerov are the poems of a master at his best. What is more, they are accessible. They speak out in a beautiful unclouded voice of the experience of a flyer of the Second World War. Although as 'war poems' they take their place among the best of that genre, they resonate far beyond their history with an arresting immediacy."—Karl Shapiro "Nemerov is the poet of our sanity, his the vision of the heroic ordinary. . . . Forty years after W. W. II, Nemerov's experiences in that war translate into timeless poetry. . . . Nemerov's poetry will outlast our generation: to read it now is to take part in something of ourselves and our world that will—and should—endure."—The Virginia Quarterly Review "Throughout all his verse, formal language sets up a proscenium, keeping sentiment at a distance. In this elegant theatre, he tells stories that always, first, are works of art."—Denise Low, Kansas City Star
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.
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.
