Paul Green's War Songs: A Southern Poet's History of the Great War 1917-1920

by Paul Green, John Herbert Roper (Editor)

Between 1917 and 1919, often literally with the sound of the battlefield guns in his ears, Paul Green wrote poems about the enormity of World War I. These poems he kept in five separate manuscript collections, and, with only a few exceptions, he did not publish them or even talk much about them during his long career. Recently acquisitioned in the Paul Green Papers in the Southern Historical Collection of the Library of the University of North Carolina and published here for the first time, Paul Green's war poems provide another chapter to the literary responses to World War I, "the war to end all wars" and the transforming event usually credited, or blamed, for closing off one cultural era and replacing it with a self-conscious Modernism. In particular, Green's poems provide considerable insight into the ways that the twentieth-century rural culture of eastern North Carolina was reshaped by the experiences of that war. Historian John Herbert Roper contributes an introduction, notes, and an interpretive essay that provide a cultural and biographical background for these poems.

184 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Librarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Paul Eliot Green was an American playwright best known for his historical dramas of life in North Carolina during the first decades of the twentieth century. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his 1927 play, In Abraham's Bosom, which was included in Burns Mantle's The Best Plays of 1926-1927.

Green was also a composer, and he collaborated with Kurt Weill. His best known songs include "Oh, Heart of Love", "On the Rio Grande", "Mon Ami, My Friend" and "Johnny's Song".