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Reviews two volumes of the book `The Papers of General Nathanael Greene,' edited by Richard K. Showman, Dennis M. Conrad, Roger N. Parks, and Elizabeth C. Stevens.

Reviews Volume IV through Volume VI of `The Papers of General Nathanael Greene,' edited by Richard K. Showman, Robert E. McCarthy, Dennis M. Conrad, Elizabeth C. Stevens, E. Wayne Carp, Susan M. Bowler, Nathaniel N. Shipton, Mary MacKechnie Showman, Laurie L. Weinstein, and Roger N. Parks.

A critique is presented of poems such as "Planetarium," "The Demon Lover," and "The Burning of Paper Instead of Children" by Adrienne Rich, which allude to the Vietnam War and Rich's understanding of feminism. Rich's involvement in the civil rights and anti-war movements in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s is discussed, as well as her belief in pacifism.

This paper involves a close reading of Herman Melville's poem “On the Photograph of a Corps Commander,” published in Melville's 1866 collection Battle-Pieces. Realizing that Melville's poem is one of the first descriptions (ekphrases) of a photograph in verse, the paper explores how Melville's poem uses physiognomy to describe the subject of the photograph: an American Civil War general, who is only identified as “the Corps Commander.” In this way, Melville's poem reflects the nineteenth-century philosophical and popular notions of photography. These notions came to regard photography as a Neoplatonic medium capable of recording and revealing the inner character of its subjects. Relying on these conceptions of photography, Melville's poem describes the photograph of the Corps Commander as having the power to reveal the Platonic absolute of American masculinity, and thus it comes to hail the photograph as a semi-sacred image that has the power to draw Anglo-Saxon American men into a common brotherhood. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While Niedecker's “life by water” is the subject of many of her poems, reflecting the experience of living on the flood-prone island of Black Hawk, Wisconsin, the water imagery that saturates many of her poems also becomes a way of reflecting upon time as it is experienced, of consciousness as process, of subjectivity as something pulled along by a temporal stream. The poetics of temporal flow suggests Niedecker's interest in exploring forms of experience that fall outside conscious attention and that point to her affinity with the modernist philosopher of time, Henri Bergson, whose Creative Evolution she read in 1955. This paper examines some of the short, concise poems Niedecker wrote in the 1950s, together with the later, looser-limbed poems such as “Paean to Place” where she turns away from the objectivist principles of com pression in order to produce fluid, malleable poems commensurate with the flow of experience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper concerns Black women poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Considered by modern critics to have adopted anachronistic subject matter and to be out of step with the militant race-consciousness of the period, these poets have been largely neglected in discussions of the 1920's, despite the fact that this was the most significant flowering of Black women's writing until the 1960's. I provide an interpretive model that reveals the rebellious messages in this verse, one that helps explain the poets' imaginative choices by placing them in their historical context and liking them to a female poetic tradition. This approach makes clear the affirming nature of Renaissance poetry by women and makes it accessible to us today, anticipating as it does contemporary issues and forging a modern sensibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents insights into the poem "Garbage," by A.R. Ammons. The author discusses the science of garbology, explores the ecological and political debate surrounding the controversy of waste, and examines how the poem relates to America's twentieth-century awakening of consciousness to its waste problem.

The article presents information on the book "A Generation of Change: A Profile of America's Older Generation," by Jacob S. Siegel. This book is one of a census monograph series on the population of the United States in the 1980s produced for the National Committee for Research on the 1980 Census. The committee is promoting a coordinated program of census analysis by interdisciplinary groups of scholars. This book arrived on my desk as I was preparing a paper on the future of home-based services for elderly people and was surrounded by special reports from the U.S. Census Bureau, the American Association of Retired Persons, and similar sources. The fact that this book was based on the 1980 census at first unnerved me, knowing how policy analysts, politicians, and students want the most up-to-date numbers. Much of the information in the book, however, has been updated to the mid-1980s by use of the current population reports, other government studies, and the work of specialists in gerontology.