What's the Use? Writing Poetry in Wartime.

What is the use of writing poems against war if they reenact rather than alter the binaries and brutalities of the war imagination they claim to protest? Why does so much contemporary war poetry only compound war's depleting effect instead of offering us energy for resistance? In "The Life of Poetry" (1949), Muriel Rukeyser defines poetry as a vital but underused national resource for a culture dominated by war. As a creative transfer of energy, poetry complicates and resists habits of imagination that sustain war. Using Rukeyser's analysis to contrast a representative poem from the volume "Poets Against the War" (2003) to several poems by Forche, Celan, James Wright, Blake,Yeats, Oppen, and Levertov, this paper discusses ways in which poetry about war and wartime can provide useful, life-giving energy without replicating the very violences it claims to oppose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]