Poems of General George S. Patton, Jr. Lines of Fire

". . . this is the first time virtually all of his verses have been assembled in a single volume. The result is as entertaining as it is informative. . . . he used the medium of poetry to express his knowledge of military history, his conception of manhood, and his personal beliefs in the ennobling aspects of war and its consequences. . . . Lines of Fire is must reading for all students of one of this country's greatest soldiers. By providing another dimension to the controversial commander, Prioli has made a major contribution to the Patton legend." - Infantry

"Professor Carmine Prioli has been eminently successful in doing what the World War II general and his wife twice failed to do - publish a book of George Patton's poetry. . . . [Prioli] goes beyond reprinting eighty-six of Patton's poems, by describing the setting in which each was written and commenting on his many allusions to mythology, literature, and barracks language of the time. . . . Prioli [also] casts a cold professional eye on the literary quality of the Patton poetry." _ Roger H. Nye (Ph.D. and Colonel, USA-Ret.), Chairman of the Friends of the West Point Library and author of The Patton Mind, in Scholarly Research and Review

"Whomever critics and historians may hope to discover in this collection, it will not be a shrinking lyricist. By and large, the poet-general conforms to his public face, to the popular caricature of himself as a mean and snarling bulldog that Eisenhower kept on a chain. Even in his shadow-life as a rhymester, he wore a belligerent glare. What surprises you is that so active and uncontemplative a man should have stockpiled so much verse. . . . Certainly the effect of this collection will be quite the opposite from any the general might have wanted. Next to him, other twentieth-century war poets, those mostly reluctant conscripts, seem dabbling amateurs. No other poet I know -- not Wilfrid Owen nor Keith Douglas, not Randall Jarrell nor Isaac Rosenberg, despite all the hideous evidence they bring to their case against war - knows war so intimately well, or leaves us in the end with a poorer opinion of it." - X. J. Kennedy in Sewanee Review

>> See all our Poetry-Collections of Poems books