What can poetry tell us about war that news accounts or history books cannot?
Winn: For journalists, and even for historians, war is a contest. One side wins, the other loses; the balance of power in some part of the world may change as a result. But poetry is an ideal form for expressing ambiguity, and thus for describing the heroism of the vanquished, the intolerable cost of so-called victory, and above all, the complex and contradictory feelings of all those touched by war. You organize your book thematically, with sections on honor, shame, empire, chivalry, comradeship, and liberty. How do those themes help us understand the poets’ experience of war? Well, all of those themes recur in different cultures and languages, and at different times, and while I always want to respect the particularity of those circumstances, I’ve also learned a lot by setting what Homer says about shame next to poems of shame from the Vietnam era, or by thinking about the way 18th-century poets created the myth of liberty that politicians still invoke today, even though the politici
