News of War

Abstract

Drawing on original archival research, providing detailed, socio-historically attentive readings, and featuring new translations, this book offers a compelling model of comparative, transnational poetics scholarship. It charts a cross-cultural dilemma from the Spanish Civil War through World War II: how to write a war poem that acknowledges the civilian’s distance from war. Civilian witnessing is problematic within an epistemic framework that deems physical experience of combat a necessary warrant for knowledge of war. Acknowledging this dilemma spurred noncombatant poets writing in English, Spanish, and French to draw on both journalistic structures and classical rhetoric in their wartime writing. Galvin examines the work of W. H. Auden, César Vallejo, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Queneau, Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein, who regularly wrote prose for periodicals in addition to poems inspired by press coverage of war. These poets developed what Galvin calls meta-rhetoric, or self-reflexive rhetorical tropes and schemes that reveal their own mechanisms. She argues that meta-rhetoric’s self-scrutiny and self-interference constitute a significant civilian poetics. By spotlighting the speaker’s distance from war and the problem of receiving war news via print journalism, such strategies make manifest problems of literary and moral authority. Ultimately, Galvin shows that the apparent impediment of limited access to firsthand experience actually proved highly generative for civilian poetics. An epilogue argues that U.S.-based noncombatant poets in the twenty-first century write about war using similar strategies, even as they cite and ironize poetry of the 1930s and 1940s.