Because wartime is a significant social and political circumstance, it is an opportunity for poets to uncover an usefulness for their writing that could provide new content for their poems. A national style or approach to poetry develops during special times and in places where liberty is challenged. Think of Whitman and the Civil War. He became the poet spokesperson of those times and that war and that America; his poetry is a more accurate history in the psychological sense.

Who is the poet of our wartime? What are the characteristics of American poetry in the 21st...