Class Year
2017
Document Type
Blog Post
Publication Date
10-19-2015
Department 1
Civil War Institute
Abstract
I’m a poetry guy. When I expect to have some free time, I tend to carry a small book of poems somewhere on my person. I also have eclectic tastes, so the subject and the substance of my little pocket anthologies changes. This summer, while at home from Gettysburg National Military Park, I pulled a book off the shelf—War Poems, from the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets series. I found plenty of what you might expect to find in such a book—Lord Tennyson, Wilfred Owen, Randall Jarrell. The subjects were classic—the “wild charge” of the Light Brigade, the “froth-corrupted lungs” of gassed men on the Western Front, the callous “hose” that washes out the wet scraps of the tragic turret gunner. Most of the poems I had already read before, so I was doubly surprised to find—in an anthology of war poems spread across the full breadth of both the Western and Eastern traditions of war verse—Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “The Colored Soldiers,” published posthumously in 1913 [excerpt].
Copyright Note
This is the author's version of the work. This publication appears in Gettysburg College's institutional repository by permission of the copyright owner for personal use, not for redistribution.
Recommended Citation
LaRoche, Matthew D., "“The Colored Soldiers”—The Poem You Never Knew Existed" (2015). The Gettysburg Compiler: On the Front Lines of History. 110.
https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/compiler/110
Comments
This blog post originally appeared in The Gettysburg Compiler and was created by students at Gettysburg College.