Research Catalog

Title

Poetry of witness : the tradition in English, 1500-2001 / edited by Carolyn Forche and Duncan Wu.

Publication

New York : W. W. Norton & Company, [2014]

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

• Wu, Duncan
• Forché, Carolyn
• Forché, Carolyn
• Woodberry Poetry Room (Harvard College Library). Collections, repository. poe

Description

xx, 641 pages; 24 cm

Summary

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, abducted 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.

Subject

• Poetry > Translations into English
• Witnesses > Poetry
• Political atrocities > Poetry
• Military history > Poetry
• English poetry

Genre/Form

Poetry

Note

• Includes index.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

The age of tyranny -- The civil war -- The age of uncertainty -- Revolutionary upheaval -- Civil war and civil liberties -- The age of world war.

ISBN

• 9780393340426 (pbk.)
• 0393340422 (pbk.)

LCCN

^^2013035019

OCLC

861744773

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library