Poetry and the Press in Times of War (1936-1945)
Rachel Galvin's dissertation is an original and unusually well-researched study of the interplay between the documentary record of public events offered by journalism and the meditative and expressive record of such events offered by occasional poetry during the mid-twentieth century's periods of international conflict. Although scholars have been aware that the Spanish Civil War and World War II were important thematic and political concerns of the poets W.H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Queneau, and César Vallejo, her project is the first to take a close look at the archival evidence of the involvement of all of these writers in war-time and to think of their choices -- in their lives and in their art -- in inter-relation. Because each of these writers also worked formally or informally in journalism, their practice of lyric is caught up, for good or ill, with problems of facticity, immediacy, rhetoric, truth-telling, and moral judgment.
