San Antonio College Library

"At the heart of the story of America's wars are our 'citizen soldiers'-- those hometown heroes who fought and sacrificed from Bunker Hill at Charlestown to Pointe du Hoc in Normandy, and beyond, without expectation of recognition or recompense. Americans like to think that the service of its citizen volunteers is, and always has been, of momentous importance in our politics and society. But though this has made for good storytelling, the reality...

Ten original essays by advanced scholars and well-published poets address the middle generation of American poets, including the familiar--Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, and John Berryman--and various important contemporaries: Delmore Schwartz, Theodore Roethke, Robert Hayden, and Lorine Niedecker. This was a famously troubled cohort of writers, for reasons both personal and cultural, and collectively their poems give us powerful,...

Since the cultural conflicts over the Vietnam War and civil rights protests, poets and poetry have consistently raised questions surrounding public address, social relations, friction between global policies and democratic institutions, and the interpretation of political events and ideas. InPoets Beyond the Barricade: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent after 1960, Dale Smith makes meaningful links among rhetoric, literature, and cultural studies,...

"The Holocaust remains incomprehensible to the world at large and without a compelling claim on most people's lives. By contrast the term "Holocaust" occupies a central place in Jewish vocabulary, and it is kept current in American letters and film. This book reflects on and analyzes poetry by four contemporary Americans - Sylvia Plath, William Heyen, Gerald Stern, and Jerome Rothenberg - none of whom directly experienced the war of annihilation directed...