Mark W. Van Wienen – författare

This masterfully assembled volume, arranged chronologically, reveals American poets' shifting, conflicting reactions to the war and highlights their efforts to shape U.S. policies and define American attitudes. In his introduction, Mark W. Van Wienen describes the rapid, politically charged responses possible in a culture attuned to poetry. His historical and biographical notes provide a sturdy framework for the study of poetry's role in social activism and change during the "war to end war." The most complete resource of its kind, Rendezvous with Death brings together poetry originally published in little magazines, labor journals, newspapers, and wartime anthologies. Alight with sorrow, grace, silliness, satire, pride, and anger, works by IWW members, sock poets, pacifists, and protestors take their places next to those by Edith Wharton, Alan Seeger, Wallace Stevens, James Weldon Johnson, Amy Lowell, and Claude McKay.

Partisans and Poets explores the popular poetries which interacted with American political culture during World War I. Studying the interplay between poets, political groups and social transformation, the book draws upon archival materials to explore poetry used by the Woman's Peace Party, the Industrial Workers of the World, the NAACP, and The Vigilantes, a patriotic writers' syndicate. Van Wienen describes how poetry in mainstream newspapers and major-press anthologies bolstered dominant, nationalist ideologies, and demonstrates how pacifist and socialist verse mobilised minority groups contending for hegemonic power. While recovering the work of several forgotten modern poets - women, blacks, pacifists, patriots, and radicals - the book asserts that wartime poetry engaged in complex negotiations with specific and often dangerous political and historical circumstances.

Partisans and Poets explores the popular poetries which interacted with American political culture during World War I. Studying the interplay between poets, political groups and social transformation, the book draws upon archival materials to explore poetry used by the Woman's Peace Party, the Industrial Workers of the World, the NAACP, and The Vigilantes, a patriotic writers' syndicate. Van Wienen describes how poetry in mainstream newspapers and major-press anthologies bolstered dominant, nationalist ideologies, and demonstrates how pacifist and socialist verse mobilised minority groups contending for hegemonic power. While recovering the work of several forgotten modern poets - women, blacks, pacifists, patriots, and radicals - the book asserts that wartime poetry engaged in complex negotiations with specific and often dangerous political and historical circumstances.

American Literature in Transition, 1910-1920 offers provocative new readings of authors whose innovations are recognized as inaugurating Modernism in US letters, including Robert Frost, Willa Cather, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, H. D., and Marianne Moore. Gathering the voices of both new and established scholars, the volume also reflects the diversity and contradictions of US literature of the 1910s. 'Literature' itself is construed variously, leading to explorations of jazz, the movies, and political writing as well as little magazines, lantern slides, and sports reportage. One section of thematic essays cuts across genre boundaries. Another section oriented to formats drills deeply into the workings of specific media, genres, or forms. Essays on institutions conclude the collection, although a critical mass of contributors throughout explore long-term literary and cultural trends - where political repression, race prejudice, war, and counterrevolution are no less prominent than experimentation, progress, and egalitarianism.