American Poetry and the First World War connects American poetry to the political and economic forces behind American participation in World War I. Dayton investigates the ways that poetry was used to imagine the war and studies a wide range of poetry: open and closed form, formal and colloquial, well-known and unknown. In a chapter on Edith Wharton, Dayton demonstrates that many of the features of poetry also found expression in prose about the war. Seeing the war as the opening bid in American ascent to global hegemony, Dayton unlocks some of the ways that literature provided a means by which to accept - and occasionally contest - the price to be paid for power. American Poetry and the First World War draws on a wide range of reading in the primary texts of the period, archival research, historical materialist theory, and work in political and economic history and international relations.

In the years of and around the First World War, American poets, fiction writers, and dramatists came to the forefront of the international movement we call Modernism. At the same time a vast amount of non- and anti-Modernist culture was produced, mostly supporting, but also critical of, the US war effort. A History of American Literature and Culture of the First World War explores this fraught cultural moment, teasing out the multiple and intricate relationships between an insurgent Modernism, a still-powerful traditional culture, and a variety of cultural and social forces that interacted with and influenced them. Including genre studies, focused analyses of important wartime movements and groups, and broad historical assessments of the significance of the war as prosecuted by the United States on the world stage, this book presents original essays defining the state of scholarship on the American culture of the First World War.

Vol. for 1958 includes "Anthology of poems from the seventeen previously published Braithwaite anthologies."