James Anderson Winn Discusses His Book "The Poetry of War"

Hosted by Barnes and Noble at Boston University

James Anderson Winn, a BU professor of English, started working on The Poetry of War during a sabbatical in 2001. He’d written an introduction and part of the first chapter when terrorists crashed planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. At that moment, Winn says, “the book suddenly became a lot more timely.”

Rather than write a chronological history of poets reflecting on wars through the ages, Winn divided his book up into poems from various historical conflicts that touched on broad themes such as honor, shame, empire, comradeship, and liberty. In this reading, he discusses three poems that trace the changing motivations for battle, from the honor revered by Richard Lovelace in his 1649 poem “To Lucasta” to the idea of fighting for liberty touched on by Hervey Allen in poetry about World War I to killing linked with shame in the poetry Philip Appleman wrote during the Vietnam War.

March 4, 2008, 7 p.m.
Barnes & Noble at Boston University

Video length is 00:33:59.

About the Speaker:
Pulitzer Prize nominee James Anderson Winn is a BU College of Arts and Sciences professor of English. He graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University and earned a Ph.D. at Yale University, where he wrote his dissertation under Maynard Mack.

Prior to joining the BU faculty, Winn taught at Yale and at the University of Michigan, where he was the founding director of the Institute for the Humanities, one of the leading interdisciplinary institutes in the United States. At BU, he was chairman of the English department from 1998 to 2007.

In addition to The Poetry of War, Winn is the author of The Pale of Words: Reflections on the Humanities and Performance, among other works. His interests include Restoration and 18th-century English literature, and he is working on a new book, Culture and Politics in the Reign of Queen Anne. Winn is also an accomplished musician, having studied the flute with Francis Fuge of the Louisville Orchestra and Samuel Baron of the Bach Aria Group. He has won concerto competitions sponsored by the Louisville Orchestra, the Princeton University Orchestra, and the Yale Symphony.

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