Romans Angry About the Inner World (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Robert Bly
- First Published: 1967
- Type of Work: Narrative
- Genres: Poetry, Narrative poetry
- Subjects: Capital punishment, Vietnam War, War, Greek or Roman times, Rome
The Poem
“Romans Angry About the Inner World” begins with a question, and the rest of the poem is an attempt to answer this question: “What shall the world do with its children?” It was written during the Vietnam War as one of the blatant antiwar poems Bly collected in The Light Around the Body, but the contemporary conflict is placed in the historical context of ancient Rome, which—once the parallels are understood and the distant past conflated with the present—makes the present terror even more horrific.
The poem is built around a series of...
[The entire page is 1459 words long]
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