"The Holocaust remains incomprehensible to the world at large and without a compelling claim on most people's lives. By contrast the term "Holocaust" occupies a central place in Jewish vocabulary, and it is kept current in American letters and film. This book reflects on and analyzes poetry by four contemporary Americans - Sylvia Plath, William Heyen, Gerald Stern, and Jerome Rothenberg - none of whom directly experienced the war of annihilation directed against European Jewry.

For these poets, who must accommodate what they cannot ignore or deny, writing becomes a moral obligation as commemoration, catharsis, atonement, history, insistence on human sensitivities, resistance to brutalization, indifference, and flight from consequences."--BOOK JACKET.