Rendezvous With Death—American Poems of the Great War

Juxtaposing the high literary art of well-known modernists with wartime verse by working men and women, soldiers, and pacifists, Rendezvous with Death collects an unprecedented range of American poetic responses to the Great War.This masterfully assembled volume, arranged chronologically, reveals the poets' shifting, conflicting reactions to the war and highlights their efforts to shape U.S. policies and define American attitudes. Mark W. Van Wienen's introduction describes the politically charged, ubiquitous, and rapid responses necessary in a culture soaked in poetry, and 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 all wars."

The most complete resource of its kind, Rendezvous with Death brings together poetry published in little magazines, labor journals, mainstream newspapers, and wartime anthologies in an effort to locate the contentious and disparate voices of these Americans in the dialogue of their times. Alight with sorrow, grace, silliness, passion, wicked satire, and pride, works by IWW members, sock poets, soldiers' mothers, and protestors take their places next to those by Edith Wharton, Alan Seeger, Wallace Stevens, James Weldon Johnson, Amy Lowell, and Paul Laurence Dunbar.