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Whether Thersites in Homer's Iliad, Wilfred Owen in \"Dulce et Decorum Est,\" or Allen Ginsberg in \"Wichita Vortex Sutra,\" poets have long given solitary voice against the brutality of war. The hasty cancellation of the 2003 White House symposium \"Poetry and the American Voice\" in the face of protests by Sam Hamill and other invited guests against the coming \"shock and awe\" campaign in Iraq reminded us that poetry and poets still have the power to challenge the powerful.Behind the Linesinvestigates American war resistance poetry from the Second World War through the Iraq wars. Rather than simply chronicling the genre, Philip Metres argues that this poetry gets to the heart of who is authorized to speak about war and how it can be represented. As such, he explores a largely neglected area of scholarship: the poet's relationship to dissenting political movements and the nation.In his elegant study, Metres examines the ways in which war resistance is registered not only in terms of its content but also at the level of the lyric. He proposes that protest poetry constitutes a subgenre that-by virtue of its preoccupation with politics, history, and trauma-probes the limits of American lyric poetry. Thus, war resistance poetry-and the role of what Shelley calls unacknowledged legislators-is a crucial, though largely unexamined, body of writing that stands at the center of dissident political movements.

In a 1968 speech on British immigration policy, Enoch Powell insisted that although a black man may be a British citizen, he can never be an Englishman. This book explains why such a claim was possible to advance and impossible to defend. Ian Baucom reveals how \"Englishness\" emerged against the institutions and experiences of the British Empire, rendering English culture subject to local determinations and global negotiations. In his view, the Empire was less a place where England exerted control than where it lost command of its own identity. Analyzing imperial crisis zones--including the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the Morant Bay uprising of 1865, the Amritsar massacre of 1919, and the Brixton riots of 1981--Baucom asks if the building of the empire completely refashioned England's narratives of national identity. To answer this question, he draws on a surprising range of sources: Victorian and imperial architectural theory, colonial tourist manuals, lexicographic treatises, domestic and imperial cricket culture, country house fetishism, and the writings of Ruskin, Kipling, Ford Maddox Ford, Forster, Rhys, C.L.R. James, Naipaul, and Rushdie--and representations of urban riot on television, in novels, and in parliamentary sessions. Emphasizing the English preoccupation with place, he discusses some crucial locations of Englishness that replaced the rural sites of Wordsworthian tradition: the Morant Bay courthouse, Bombay's Gothic railway station, the battle grounds of the 1857 uprising in India, colonial cricket fields, and, last but not least, urban riot zones.