Poetry of witness : the tradition in English, 1500-2001

Poetry of witness The tradition in English, 1500-2001

Book - 2014

A groundbreaking anthology containing the work of poets who have witnessed war, imprisonment, torture, and slavery. A companion volume to Against Forgetting, Poetry of Witness is the first anthology to reveal a tradition that runs through English-language poetry. The 300 poems collected here were composed at an extreme of human endurance--while their authors awaited execution, endured imprisonment, fought on the battlefield, or labored on the brink of breakdown or death. All bear witness to historical events and the irresistibility of their impact. Alongside Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, this volume includes such writers as Anne Askew, tortured and executed for her religious beliefs during the reign of Henry VIII; Phillis Wheatley, a...bducted by slave traders; Samuel Bamford, present at the Peterloo Massacre in 1819; William Blake, who witnessed the Gordon Riots of 1780; and Samuel Menashe, survivor of the Battle of the Bulge. Poetry of Witness argues that such poets are a perennial feature of human history, and it presents the best of that tradition, proving that their work ranks alongside the greatest in the language.

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Subjects
Poetry > Translations into English.
Witnesses > Poetry.
Political atrocities > Poetry.
Military history > Poetry.
Published
New York, N.Y. : W.W. Norton & Company [2014]
Language
English
Other Authors
Carolyn Forché (editor of compilation), Duncan Wu
Edition
First edition
Item Description
Includes index.
Physical Description
xx, 641 pages ; 24 cm
ISBN
9780393340426
  • The age of tyranny
  • The civil war
  • The age of uncertainty
  • Revolutionary upheaval
  • Civil war and civil liberties
  • The age of world war.
Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* The 300 poems gathered so astutely in this authoritative and stirring anthology were written by poets of the past whose lives were changed, even destroyed, by war, oppression, imprisonment, torture, slavery, and exile. Poet Forche (Blue Hour, 2003) has long been a champion and practitioner of poetry of conscience, creating the genre-defining Against Forgetting (1993). She now teams up with fellow English professor Wu to excavate the roots of this essential tradition of poetry that confronts evil and its embodiments in appeals for a shared sense of humanity and collective resistance. The sheer enormity of this living archive, an artistic record of five centuries of violence and suffering and protest and truth-telling, illuminates humankind at its most horrific and most glorious. The selections are blazing and haunting, poems of fierce precision, communal consciousness, courage, and reverberating beauty, and Forche and Wu succinctly establish the historical context for each poet's work in glinting biographical essays. William Blake, John Keats, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson are all seen from fresh vantage points. Here, too, are antislavery poet Lydia Maria Child; Olaudah Equiano, an enslaved Nigerian; Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay; WWII veteran and dissident Karl Shapiro; and conscientious objector William Stafford You walk on toward / September, the depot, the dark, the light, the dark. --Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review

Intended as a companion to editor Forche's Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, this detailed anthology of poems of witness offers compositions that are, according to coeditor Wu, "acts of resistance." For each entry, Forche and Wu (editor, Romanticism: An Anthology) provide a one-page biography of the poet that includes a statement of why his or her poetry fits the collection's themes: war, tyranny, torture, slavery, and other forms of violence. These minibiographies make enticing reading and are full of little-known author facts. Six sections explore heinous executions by Henry the VIII, mass casualties in both the English and American civil wars, 20th-century poets writing about A-bomb testing, elegies to the war dead, and more. Only a small number of poems are from the 20th century, and the volume is also limited to English-language poems, thus excluding such great poets of witness as Anna Akhmatova, Paul Celan, Marina Tsvetaeva, Primo Levi, and others. VERDICT To complement Forche's earlier book, ending the collection in 1901 would have made more sense. However, because the last 20 years have seen such an outflowing of poems about war, torture, and violence, it seems remiss to ignore much of the 20th and early 21st century. [See Prepub Alert, 7/29/13.]-Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., -Bloomington, IN (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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