War of the Words: War and the Length of Poems

This essay explores the connection between war and the length of poems, reading the Anglo-American poetry of the twentieth century in the context of the world wars. The essay traces the changes in poetic length in Italian and Hebrew poetry, focusing on the long poems of Yehuda Amichai and finding a tendency to express war experiences in short verse. In Anglo-American poetry after World War I, Pound and Eliot form an influential poetic bloc defining length from The Waste Land and The Cantos. This Pound/Eliot complex comes undone as World War II ends, allowing for a regeneration of the long poem in the works of H.D., Zukofsky, Williams, Olson, Ginsberg, and others.