War Poems

From Homer and Virgil to Byron to Yeats to Auden to Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, from ancient China's anonymous bards to Poland's Mickiewicz and Italy's Primo Levi, poets of all times, places, and sensibilities have been moved to write about war.They have commemorated Thermopylae, Agincourt, the Battle of Shiloh, London in an air raid. They have remembered the Golden Vanity and Mademoiselle from Armentieres. They have announced "The Charge of the Light Brigade, " and handed down, through oral tradition, the Blackfoot Indian "Song for a Fallen Warrior." Here are more than 100 of their most memorable poems, ranging from Horace on the Battle of Actium and Heinrich Heine's "The Two Grenadiers" to Adrienne Rich's Vietnam-era "Newsreel." From Wilfred Owen and Sigfried Sassoon to Randall Jarrell and Stevie Smith, the poets represented here have encompassed the entire spectrum of feeling -- pride, compassion, courage, anger, anguish, laughter -- in this extraordinary anthology. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.