Description

Hardcover, in dust jacket.

Roper’s editing of the Green poems, introduced by his biographical notes, make this an important book that should have gotten much more attention than it did when originally published. Green rightfully belongs at the forefront of the much better known English language poets of World War I, a list headed by Robert Graves, Wilfrid Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, and Rudyard Kipling, all English poets, and e.e. cummings, the sole American that’s most often included in this canon. (Joyce Kilmer qualifies more for his tragic death in battle than for his poems.) 

Green’s poems combined with his recently resurrected anti-war play Johnny Johnson: the Biography of a Common Man (originally produced on Broadway by the Group Theatre in 1936 with music by Kurt Weil) make him one of the most important American writers commenting on this awful subject.