Anthology on War Literature - Research Paper Example

The Skeleton in Armor - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882). Born at Portland, was the son of a Puritan. What the Bullet sang- Bret Harte (1836-1902). Born in Albany, is best remembered for his accounts of the pioneering life in California Introduction The poems that have been included in this anthology are intrinsically linked to each other. Apart from the theme of war that links all of them, they are further brought together by the fact that they originate in the same place, America. The poetry that has been included in this anthology comes from a period that precedes even the origin of America as a nation, right from the time that the early settlers of America had to face trouble at the hands of the Native Americans who fought against the invaders who were trying to steal from them their means of living and their ways of living.

In an attempt to save their culture from being destroyed, they engaged in the conflict that would be a part of the lives of the survivors of these first battles of America. These battles found a way to the poetry of this age and a selection of this has been included in this anthology. The early poetry of America was written by the puritans who formed a sizeable portion of the American population that had settled the ‘new world’. They had arrived in America, dissatisfied with the way religion and the church was run in England.

They sought to form a model of religion that they thought would serve as an ideal for the rest of the world. Along with the struggle for survival that they had to wage against the natives, the puritans found themselves in an unenviable situation. This finds its reflection in the poetry that they produced. Joel Barlow’s poem is about the trials that the Israelis face while they have to war against their Egyptian adversaries. As in this poem other poems of this period conflate religion and the war for survival to make the reader feel as though the poet is waging his war against the natives for a divine purpose.

This attribution of a metaphysical purpose to mundane activities of colonialism betrays a need for justification for a population living away from home and trying to establish a new way of living in a new place. These poems can be seen to have a style that is similar to the poets that were well-known in England at that point in time. This was inevitable since their sensibilities, to a large extent, were the same, having come from the same place and officially, belonging to the same nation. However, poetry written in around the same age would differ in their tone and purpose when they were written by a group that was generally marginalized by the mainstream communities.

These are characterized by cutting irony that points to the shortcomings that war has as a means of enforcing law and order. The poem of Phillis Wheatley that has been included in this anthology makes this point clear. It satirizes the thought of the soldier while at the same time, it also glorifies the intent of the soldier’s endeavours. The inability of the poet to break free of the stereotypes of the male soldier is visible in this fusion of irony and conformation. This irony and the disillusionment of war is something that is explored by later writers who take up the irony that the early writers had cautiously taken up and had used in their poetry.

The poem by Edgar Allan Poe that is included in this anthology, The Valley of Unrest, highlights this aspect of war that is