Poetry and the War(s)

Abstract

Abstract Three new critical monographs remind us that, when it comes to war, poets have always been political. In their respective recent volumes, Tim Dayton, Rachel Galvin, and Adam Gilbert are concerned with the ways in which poets respond not only to war itself but also the ideology and propaganda that supports it, how their work resists or sometimes replicates these scripts, and the strategies they use to construct the poetic authority to address it. These critical texts, read together, reveal that resistance to hegemonic narratives is more complicated than simply writing an antiwar poem, that subverting the narratives of war requires some knowledge of how their sociopolitical and economic algorithms function to begin with. Dayton’s study offers a model of resistance to such narratives through its revealing juxtaposition of anachronistic or propagandistic poetic rhetoric with the true nature of and motives for the US’ participation in World War I. Galvin argues for the sociopolitical validity of the work of canonical modernist poets more recently disparaged as overly absorbed in aesthetic concerns. For Gilbert, poetry is an overlooked reservoir of knowledge bearing witness to the experience of US soldiers in the American War in Vietnam.