Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500 - 2001 - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393340422 ISBN 13: 9780393340426

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014

Synopsis

Carolyn Forche interviewed about Poetry of Witness on PBS NewsHour: youtube.com/watch?v=IqLszwR7fkk

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.

"Carolyn Forche's monumental Against Forgetting: Poetry of Witness was one of the twentieth century's last great books of poetry, one of few volumes in the English language which could claim to change the way my generation viewed poetry in translation from around the world. In this sequel we are given an inexhaustible, indispensable follow-up -- a collection of voices in English that illuminate human terror . . . This book, so passionately and masterfully edited, shows English poetics anew. It shows canonical voices such as Keats and Donne from a completely different perspective and it reintroduces contemporary readers to the genius of some unjustly neglected poets who, out of war and barbarism, out of terror and fear, composed a new music for human survival." Ilya Kaminsky

About this title

About the Author

Carolyn Forche and Duncan Wu are professors of English at Georgetown University. Forche's most recent volume of poetry is Blue Hour. In 2013 she received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, given for exceptional and distinguished work in poetry. Wu is the editor of Romanticism: An Anthology, a biography of William Hazlitt, and books about poetry and drama.

Reviews

*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 Forché (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 Forché 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.” --Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393340422
• ISBN 13: 9780393340426
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 672
• Editor: Forché Carolyn, Wu Duncan