Joyce Kilmer

The volume gathers prose by the author: essays combining wartime vignettes, religious and cultural reflection, and literary criticism; a substantial series of personal letters to friends and family that reveal private feeling, faith, and responses to military service; and miscellaneous pieces including ballads, war songs, a short story, and a one-act play. The essays move between vivid scenes of soldiers and civilians, meditations on charity and national identity, and critiques of contemporary poets. The letters offer candid impressions of daily life and relationships, while the shorter pieces experiment with dramatic and lyrical forms, together presenting a portrait of a writer negotiating lyric sensibility, Catholic conviction, and the strains of war.