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 his latest book, Dayton … looks at the Great War writings of E. E. Cummings, Edith Wharton, Lynn Harold Hough, M. A. DeWolfe, and Alan Seeger through a historical materialist lens. Recommended.'

K. B. Hannel Source: Choice

'Dayton’s American Poetry and the First World War is unique … in that it looks at that war and the poetry it inspired through a Marxist-materialist lens. This confers a number of advantages, one being that it provides a model for contrasting the real reasons behind the US’ entry into the war with the jingoistic discourses perpetuated in its favor that the poets whom Dayton examines (mostly) amplified.'

Michael S. Begnal Source: American Literary History