This panel explores how 20^th and 21^st century Anglophone poetry undertakes the fraught task of representing violence. Each of these papers considers how poetic form, particularly devices like metaphor, allusion, and colloquial speech, crafts multiple and complex perspectives on political violence. Depicting violence is in itself a political act, one which has long preoccupied literary scholars. Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) famously castigates certain World War I poets for their overly cerebral, insufficiently gritty depictions of conflict, a line of critique which has endured in subsequent criticism. His argument is a refined version of the more prevalent critique of propaganda, with its sanitized idealization of combat and sectarianism. By contrast, debates in news media and the public humanities have articulated the risks of overly graphic representations of violence, both in desensitizing audience members to human suffering and conversely in triggering trauma responses. With these manifold risks, how can literature effectively depict human suffering?

This question has only grown more urgent in recent years, as the spate of significant centennials (World War I, the Easter Rising, the Spanish Flu, and the annus mirabilis 1922) has prompted extensive discussion of the modes and ethics of commemoration. This panel brings together critical conversations on war poetry, trauma theory, and commemoration to examine how poetic form crafts multiple perspectives on political violence. As Jahan Ramazani notes in A Transnational Poetics, “Poetry functions... as a language that can mediate seemingly irresolvable contradictions” (6). This panel will traverse nearly a century of Anglophone poetry to make the case that the distinctive formal strategies of modern poetics offer particularly nuanced ways of grappling with violence and trauma.

Sarah Coogan’s paper addresses High Modernist poetics, exploring how T. S. Eliot and David Jones deploy multiple overlapping typological interpretations of their poetic imagery to encapsulate the conflicted experience of wartime violence. Jones’ poetry and visual art depicts soldiers as both sacrificial victims and perpetrators of violence, tools of an inhuman state apparatus. Eliot’s “Dove Descending” in Little Gidding unites the destruction of German bombers with the regenerative power of the Holy Spirit. Both poets refuse to separate the redemptive purpose of personal heroism from the aimless impersonality of modern warfare.

Bill Fogarty addresses mid-century British and American poetry in his paper, focusing on Tony Harrison, Seamus Heaney, and Gwendolyn Brooks. He argues that Brooks serves as a poetic forbear for Harrison and Heaney in deploying colloquial language to give voice to the victims of political violence. This approach addresses a lingering concern, explicitly articulated by Harrison and Heaney, that poetic depictions of political violence might be exploitative. Vernacular speech becomes a way to directly and respectfully give voice to victims.

Mayy ElHayawi will conclude the panel by addressing 21^st century poetry. Her paper analyzes Sister's Entrance (2018) the debut collection of the Yale-educated poet and Darfurian refugee Emtithal Mahmoud, whose work engages with traumatic memories of genocide. Mahmoud’s poetry enacts embodied memories of suffering and trauma, thereby entangling multiple loci of perception and turning them into a magnifying lens that both dissects the individual and collective levels of national trauma and stitches them back to a universal context of discrimination, injustice and racism.

Each of these papers emphasizes poetry’s capacity to foster multiple, complex perspectives on political violence. These texts exemplify the perils and possibilities of literary commemoration, holding in tension the irreparability of suffering with the natural meaning-making impulse of art. This panel therefore explores not only how the problem of representing violence shapes poetic form, but also how those forms can intervene politically. We anticipate a lively conversation surrounding literary form, the ethics of representation, and the evolution of transnational Anglophone poetry.

Panelists have been asked to restrict their papers to between 15 and 18 minutes to leave ample time for conversation. Sarah Coogan will serve as Presider, ensuring time limits are enforced and facilitating discussion. The panelists wish to emphasize that, while we prefer an online format given the unpredictability of international travel regulations in the coming year, we will be happy to present in person if necessary.