180 Poetry for Students
battle victories and medals of honor are not all that
heroes share in common, but that a trail of blood-
shed and devastation also follows each one. In se-
lecting the historical lauding of Alexander the
Great as an example of the world’s human source
of evilness, the poet attempts to showcase the epit-
ome of heroism-gone-bad. The poem states that the
greater the battle stories—and, therefore, the
greater the number of casualties—the more likely
the winner will become known as a “god.” But
something is wrong, Dugan warns, with glossing
over the loss of life that occurs in wars in favor of
tales of glory and heroic acts. It is not the warriors
themselves who are the source of wrongness; they
are, rather, a product of the real problem. And that
real problem is the unexplainable, pervasive force
of human nature that glorifies war and perpetuates
its existence.
Source:Pamela Steed Hill, in an essay for Poetry for Stu-
dents,Gale, 2001.Sources
Birkerts, Sven, “But Does It Rhyme?,” in Washington Post,
August 2, 1998.
Deutsch, Babette, Poetry Handbook: A Dictionary of Terms:
Fourth Edition,Harper Perennial, 1974.
Ellman, Richard, and Robert O’Clair, eds., The Norton An-
thology of Modern Poetry: 2nd Edition,W. W. Norton,
1988, pp. 1089-1090.McClanahan, Thomas, Dictionary of Literary Biography,
Volume 5: American Poets since World War II, First Se-
ries,Gale, 1980.
“The Poetry of Things: An Interview with Alan Dugan,” in
Compost,Fall, 1999, pp. 42-45.For Further Study
Bradley, George, ed., The Yale Younger Poets Anthology,
Yale University Press, 1998.
This collection gives some comparative sense of the
distinctiveness of Dugan’s poetry when it first ap-
peared by placing it in the context of the work of
other Yale Younger Poets, such as George Starbuck
and Adrienne Rich.
Forche, Carolyn, ed., Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Cen-
tury Poetry of Witness,W. W. Norton, 1993.
Dugan’s poetry is collected along with the work of
others, all of it wrestling with the obligations of po-
ets to bear witness to the darkest truths of history.
Howard, Richard, Alone with America: Essays on the Art of
Poetry in the United States since 1950,Atheneum, 1969, pp.
99-106.
A helpful start in placing Dugan’s early work in a
historic and poetic contextt.
Stepanchev, Stephen, American Poetry since 1945,Harper,
1965.
Another useful guide to placing Dugan’s early work
in its historic and poetic context, but its tone, and its
judgments, may seem dated to contemporary stu-
dents.How We Heard the Name