Paul Green's War Songs

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.