ABSTRACT
A t the birth of the English language, the Beowulf poet madean epic war poem in Anglo-Saxon, and in the Renaissance, Shakespeare thrust war into plays. Through the Enlightenment and on into the Romantic revolution, Dryden, Byron, and others waxed at ceremonial length about the glories of war. Even so late as 1937, David Jones shaped a long, albeit prickly, narrative poem on World War I, In Parenthesis. However, for 20th-century American war poets, novels and films have thoroughly preempted the imaginative energy that might have gone into epic or drama. In its briefer national trajectory, American war poetry truly began with Walt Whitman's lyric and elegiac pieces in Drum Taps (1865), and settling for immediacy, compression, and intensity, 20th-century war poets continue to favor the shorter lyric poem.
