Horizon Information Portal

HSPLS site

eBooks/Audiobooks

Reading Program

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

View full image

New York, N.Y. : W.W. Norton & Company, c2014

English poetry.

Witnesses -- Poetry.

Political atrocities -- Poetry.

Military history -- Poetry.

9780393340426 (pbk.) :

0393340422 (pbk.)

xx, 641 pages ; 24 cm

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

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.

Horizon Information Portal 3.25_9884

Powered by Dynix

© 2001-2013 SirsiDynix All rights reserved.

Horizon Information Portal