Ezra Pound, “Lament of the Frontier Guard”

Read aloud by Robert Pinsky, Wen Stephenson, and Charles Wright

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has sent me the Chinese poems," wrote a young French-born sculptor named Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who was serving as an officer on the Western Front, to his London patron Olivia Shakespear on April 11, 1915. "I keep the book in my pocket, indeed I use them to put courage in my fellows. I speak now of the 'Bowmen' and the 'North Gate,' which are so appropriate to our case."

For many months now, I've felt the need for a war poem—one appropriate to our case. One that might answer Yeats's injunction of 1916: "I think it better that in times like these / A poet's mouth be silent." Not a poem about our current situation, in some literal sense, but one that speaks to it in an authentic, irrefutable, even universal way.

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More Soundings in Atlantic Unbound.

Robert Pinsky has translated poems of Paul Celan and Czeslaw Milosz in addition to Dante's Inferno (1994). His books of poetry include Jersey Rain (2000) and The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems (1997).

Wen Stephenson is the deputy editor of the Boston Globe's Ideas section. From 1996 to 2001 he was the editor of The Atlantic Online, where he launched the "Audible Anthology" and, in 1998, the "Soundings" series.

Charles Wright most recent collection of poems is Buffalo Yoga (2004). He received the PEN Translation Prize for his edition of Eugenio Montale's The Storm and Other Things (1978) and the Pulitzer Prize for his collection Black Zodiac (1998).