Eleanor Wilner: “How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea…?” Poetry in an Age of War, Atrocity and Censorship (January 2006)

“Atrocity,” Eleanor Wilner argues, “shadow[s] our days”; it is “an undeniable presence” that “compels response.” But how might we respond with integrity? To consider how writers might witness atrocity without being degraded by it, without “protest shading into pornography,” Wilner looks at poems by Marilyn Krysl, W.H. Auden, Maxine Kumin, Stephen Dobyns, Nell Altizer, Brian Turner, and Yusef Komunyakaa, showing ways these poets embody the precious, irreplaceable things that violence desecrates.