This poem follows directly after Child on the Marsh.  Just the page prior, Lanier was a child caught in the sucking embrace of his mother and the earth.  Now he is caught in the suck of the earth as wilderness battlefield.  The comfort of his mother's breast is replaced by the encouragement of his brother, Clifford, to steal the fresh blue shirt off the dead body of a Union soldier.

Hudgins begins:

          He was an Indiana corporal

The Battle of Chancellorsville was a major battle of the American Civil War, and the principal engagement of the Chancellorsville Campaign. It was fought from April 30 to May 6, 1863, inSpotsylvania County, Virginia, near the village of Chancellorsville.

Letters to a Stranger, by Thomas James (Graywolf Press, 2008; originally published by Houghton Mifflin, 1973)

 Lynn Riggs is the Southwest's most important playwright and a significant folk artist. His best-known play, Green Grow the Lilacs, became one of the world's greatest musicals, Oklahoma! Riggs was also a poet but mostly made his living writing Hollywood film scripts. Half of his thirty plays are set in the Southwest, and he vividly depicted life in the old Indian territory with all its comedy and tragedy.

Gwendolyn B. Bennett (1902-1981) was a key figure in the development of the Harlem Renaissance and was a mainstay in the Harlem arts and education communities long after the Renaissance ended. Between 1924 and 1928 Bennett enjoyed her most successful publishing period. She published over thirty poems, short stories, and reviews in leading African American magazines and anthologies, including Countee Cullen’s Caroling Dusk (1927), Charles S.

Poetry:

“To a Dark Girl.” Opportunity 5.10 (October 1927): 299.

 “Advice.” Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets. Ed. Countee Cullen. New

            York: Harper and Row, 1927. 156.

“Dear Things.” Palms 4 (October 1926): 22.

“Dirge.” Palms 4 (October 1926): 22.

“Epitaph” Opportunity 12.3 (March 1934): 76.

“Fantasy.” Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets. Ed. Countee Cullen. New

Gwendolyn Bennett Crosscup of Kutztown, Pa., a figure in the Harlem Renaissance Movement in the 1920s, died in the Reading, Pa. Hospital on May 30.

She would have been 79 in August.

Her poetry has been published in anthologies and has been translated into Spanish and other languages.

In 1979, a doctoral dissertation on her life and career as a poet, painter, art teacher, and Harlem educator, was accepted at a university in Atlanta.

It may sound peculiar if not perverse to insist that happiness is part of Donald Justice's aesthetics, when anyone who knows his poetry recognizes that its prevailing mood is sadness; indeed, "Sadness" is the title of one of his recent poems, and it includes the line, "Sadness has its own beauty, of course," which could be taken as a statement of aesthetics more readily than the earlier line, "What is it to be happy, after all?" But I am referring not only to a mood, even though I do believe the feeling of happiness, especially remembered happiness, is one Justice does seek to create or rec

There are two remarkable turns in Donald Justice’s Italian sonnet “The Wall.” One could be called rhetorical, that is, built into the Italian sonnet form with its octave-sestet argumentative structure, and one dramatic, provided by the narrative and the way that Justice chooses to tell or dramatize the story. Surely one of the great accomplishments of “The Wall” is that it manages to fit Paradise Lost into 14 lines!