American writers on peace and against war

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

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George Ade: The dubious rights granted a people “liberated” through war

Conrad Aiken: The history of war is the history of mankind, seven thousand million dead on the field of battle

Conrad Aiken: Vast symphonic dance of death

Julius Myron Alexander: The Flag of Peace

Julius Myron Alexander: It is but war, ask not the cause

Hervey Allen: Dragon’s Breath

Hervey Allen: Hands off our dead! To war orators.

James Lane Allen: Then white and heavenly Peace again. Eteocles and Polyneices in America

Ellen P. Allerton: Peace After War

Sherwood Anderson: War destroys brotherhood

W. H. Anderson: Our Brother’s Keeper

H. Lavinia Baily: By the Sea. An Argument for Peace.

H. Lavinia Baily: A Lost Song?

H. Lavinia Baily: A New Earth

H. Lavinia Baily: Recall

Josephine Turck Baker: To the Mothers of the Martyred Dead upon the Field of Battle

Joel Barlow: War after war his hungry soul require, each land lie reeking with its people’s slain

Katharine Lee Bates: Selections on war and peace

Katharine Lee Bates: Carnage! Bayonet, bomb and shell! Merry reading for hell!

Katherine Lee Bates: Children of the War

Katharine Lee Bates: The doomful, mad torpedo, the colossal slaughter-guns

Katherine Lee Bates: Fodder for Cannon

Katharine Lee Bates: Marching Feet

Katharine Lee Bates: Mother

Katharine Lee Bates: When the Millennium Comes

Edward Bellamy: We have no wars now, and our governments no war powers

Stephen Vincent Benét: The dead march from the last to the next blind war

Stephen Vincent Benét: Nightmare For Future Reference: The second year of the Third World War

Stephen Vincent Benét: Toy soldiers

W. C. Benet: Hymn of Peace

William Rose Benét: The Red Country

Ida Whipple Benham: The Friend of Peace

Ida Whipple Benham: War’s weeding

Ida Whipple Benham: The White Prince of peace

Adelaide George Bennett: The Peace-Pipe Quarry

Samuel Bernard: A pipe dream of peace

Ambrose Bierce: Selections on war

Ambrose Bierce: Chickamauga

Ambrose Bierce: The Coup de Grâce

Ambrose Bierce: Demonic war

Ambrose Bierce: He created patriotism and taught the nations war

Ambrose Bierce: Killed At Resaca

Ambrose Bierce: Military Malthusianism

Ambrose Bierce: An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

Ambrose Bierce: War as parricide

Ambrose Bierce: Warlike America

Charles A. Blanchard: What is war? Is peace possible?

Robert Bly: War, writers and government money

Carl John Bostelmann: Hate, still thy drums! War, make thy trumpets mute!

Randolph Bourne: Selections on war

Randolph Bourne: The War and the Intellectuals

Randolph Bourne: War and the State

Randolph Bourne: Willing war means willing all the evils that are organically bound up with it

Randolph Bourne: Conscience and Intelligence in War

Randolph Bourne: Twilight of Idols

Randolph Bourne: Below the Battle

Berton Braley: The nobler army fights the bloodless battles of industry and peace

Edward Arnold Brenholtz: Selections on peace and war

Edwin Arnold Brenholtz: The Demon, War

Edwin Arnold Brenholtz: The Dying Warrior

Edwin Arnold Brenholtz: If war is sane, make me insane

Edward Arnold Brenholtz: Now be the God of Peace adored

Edwin Arnold Brenholtz: The Passion of Peace

Edwin Arnold Brenholtz: Peace, the Conqueror

Louis Bromfield: NATO, Permanent War Panic and America’s Messiah Complex

Van Wyck Brooks: The truth about war that Mark Twain could only divulge after death

William E. Brooks: Memorial Day

Laura Helena Brower: Heritage. The blighted fruit of war.

Charles Brockden Brown: Such is the spectacle exhibited in every field of battle

Waldo R. Browne: War, a parable

Kenneth Bruce: Universal Peace

William Jennings Bryan: What the world would have lost if Shakespeare had been killed as a soldier, Burns had fallen on the battlefield

William Cullen Bryant: Christmas 1875

William Cullen Bryant: Emblem of the peace that yet shall be, noise of war shall cease from sea to sea

John Wright Buckham: The Heroisms of Peace

George Shepard Burleigh: Martial Heroism

George Shepard Burleigh: When shall the crystal fount of Peace wash out the hideous stain of blood?

Dana Burnett: Selections on war

Dana Burnet: Ammunition. The Dead.

Dana Burnet: Christmas in the Trenches

Dana Burnet: The Deserter

Dana Burnet: The Dreadnaught

Dana Burnet: The Glory of War

Dana Burnet: Napoleon’s Tomb

Dana Burnet: Sleep, Little Soldier, Sleep

Dana Burnet: The Village

Dana Burnet: War

Dana Burnet: The world’s awry and there are no more dreams!

Vincent Godfrey Burns: An Ex-Serviceman Makes a Vow

Vincent Godfrey Burns: Hell à la mode

Vincent Godfrey Burns: The Hun

Amelia Josephine Burr: Two Viewpoints

Elihu Burritt: Dismantled Arsenals. Death, sin and Satan weep over the grave of their renowned confederate, War.

Elihu Burritt: Woman and War

Struthers Burt: To a Friend Wanting War

Witter Bynner: War

William Herbert Carruth: When the Cannon Booms

Alice Cary: Better dwell the lowliest shepherd of Arcadia’s bowers

Anne Cleveland Cheney: All Ye Who Pass By

Charles Chesnutt: Justice, Peace – the seed and the flower of civilisation

Thomas Curtis Clark: Apparitions

Thomas Curtis Clark: Bugle Song of Peace

Thomas Curtis Clark: Who made war?

Florence Earle Coates: The New Mars

Florence Earle Coates: War

Humphrey Cobb: Selections on war

Humphrey Cobb: Generals are reassured by the smell of the dead

Humphrey Cobb: Hallucination of fantastic butchery; too much for one man to bear

Humphrey Cobb: The paths of glory lead but to the rats

Humphrey Cobb: Reworking the sixth commandment for war; thou shalt not commit individual murder

Humphrey Cobb: War never settled anything except who was the strongest

John Collins: Till war becomes a crime abhorred, and earth be blessed with endless peace

Elizabeth Connor: This World War

James Fenimore Cooper: Is there a star where war and bloodshed aren’t known?

James Fenimore Cooper: Oppression and injustice the natural consequences of military power uncurbed by restraints of civil authority

James Fenimore Cooper: War’s victory not worth the sacrifice of human life

Malcolm Cowley: By day there are only the dead

Wilbur F. Crafts: Not mailed but nailed the hands he turned to the world

Stephen Crane: An Episode of War

Stephen Crane: There was crimson clash of war

Stephen Crane: War Is Kind

F. Marion Crawford: Find a priest for those I have killed

F. Marion Crawford: The real issue is between civilization and barbarism, between peace and war

F. Marion Crawford: When everyone understands war it will stop by universal consent

F. Marion Crawford: The world dreads the very name of war, lest it should become universal once it breaks out

Maria Briscoe Croker: War and Peace

Ernest Crosby: Selections against war, for peace

Ernest Crosby: The Bugler in the Rear

Ernest Crosby: Peace

Ernest Crosby: The Peace Congress

Ernest Crosby: Peace has outgrown all that, for Peace is a man

Ernest Crosby: They know not love that love not peace

Ernest Crosby: War and Hell

Ernest Crosby: Woman and War

Martha Foote Crow: There is no Christ left in all those carnage-loving lands

E. E. Cummings: Detention camp during wartime

Mary L. Cummins: The News of War

Mary L. Cummins: The Women Who Wait

Olive Tilford Dargan: Beyond War

Richard Harding Davis: Destruction versus civilization, soldiers and engineers

John William De Forest: Uncivil war

Cecelia De Vere: The American flag. Peacemakers, called the children of Great God.

Emily Dickinson: I many times thought Peace had come

Nathan Haskell Dole: Selections on peace

Nathan Haskell Dole: Death: War is my Master-stroke since Days of Yore

Nathan Haskell Dole: Here are War’s pomp and circumstance

Nathan Haskell Dole: Peace’s exultation

Nathan Haskell Dole: The Reign of Peace

Nathan Haskell Dole: Thanks offering of the God of Waste and Destruction

Nathan Haskell Dole: The Vision of Peace

John Dos Passos: Selections on war

John Dos Passos: Meat for guns. Shot for saying the war was wrong.

John Dos Passos: The miserable dullness of industrialized slaughter

John Dos Passos: Not wake up till the war was over and you could be a human being again

John Dos Passos: They were going to kill everybody who spoke that language

John Dos Passos: Three Soldiers

John Dos Passos on Randolph Bourne: War is the health of the state

John Dos Passos: What was the good of stopping the war if the armies continued?

Marion Doyle: Mars and Kings have silenced all their singing

Theodore Dreiser: If he went he might be shot, and what would his noble emotion amount to then? He would rather make money, regulate current political, social and financial affairs

Theodore Dreiser: The logic of military victory, an apologue

Theodore Dreiser and Smedley Butler: War is a Racket

Louise Driscoll: The Metal Checks

W.E.B. Du Bois: Work for Peace

Paul Laurence Dunbar: Birds of peace and deadened hearts

S. B. Dunn: In Terra Pax

Finley Peter Dunne: A great nation at war (in the vernacular)

J.A. Edgerton: A Song of Peace

J.A. Edgerton: When the cannon’s roar shall be heard no more

Emma Catherine Embury: Proud soldier turns from scenes of war

Ralph Waldo Emerson: All history is the decline of war. Cannot peace be, as well as war?

Ralph Waldo Emerson: The cause of peace is not the cause of cowardice

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Universal peace is as sure as is the prevalence of civilization over barbarism

John Erskine: Dedication

Nathaniel Evans: Ode on the Prospect of Peace

Maria Louise Eve: Disarm!

Laura Bell Everett: The Skein of Grievous War

Marianne Farningham: Give Peace

William Faulkner: All we ever needed to do is just say, Enough of this

William Faulkner: There is only the question: When will I be blown up?

William Faulkner: To militarists, all civilians, even their own, are alien intruders

Eugene Field and Thorne Smith: Bacchus disables Mars

F. Scott Fitzgerald: War comes to Princeton

Mary Weston Fordham: Ode to Peace

Harold Frederic: War inflicts stifling political conformity

Robert Freeman: Peace on Earth

Philip Freneau: Death smiles alike at battles lost or won

Philip Freneau: The Prospect of Peace

Henry Blake Fuller: Killed and wounded on the fields of hate

Margaret Fuller: America, with no prouder emblem than the Dove

F. Benjamin Gage: The Sword and the Plough

Hamlin Garland: Cog in a vast machine for killing men

Jessie Wiseman Gibbs: Selections from the Peace Sonnets

Jessie Wiseman Gibbs: The blessed salve of peace for the whole bleeding world

Jessie Wiseman Gibbs: Crown him with many crowns, the Prince of Peace

Jessie Wiseman Gibbs: I sing the soldiers of the coming wars, those that save and heal

Jessie Wiseman Gibbs: Speak peace, that thou and all the lands may live, ere thou and they all perish by the sword!

Jessie Wiseman Gibbs: They say they are of Christ and do the works of Cain

Jessie Wiseman Gibbs: War is the mailèd hand of criminal states

Jessie Wiseman Gibbs: We feed bread of our children to the war-god’s greed

Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Flag of Peace

Mary Putnam Gilmore: Sweet Peace is Here

Ellen Glasgow: Selections on war

Ellen Glasgow: The Altar of the War God

Ellen Glasgow: His vision of the future only an endless warfare and a wasted land

Ellen Glasgow: The Reign of the Brute

Ellen Glasgow: “That killed how many? how many?”

Ellen Glasgow: Then the rows of dead men stared at him through the falling rain in the deserted field

Edgar Guest: The Peaceful Warriors

Louise Imogen Guiney: The voice of Peace

Hermann Hagedorn: Selections against war

Hermann Hagedorn: The fourth estate turning the thoughts of our children to war

Hermann Hagedorn: How to engineer a war

Hermann Hagedorn: Leave God out of the game!

Hermann Hagedorn: Slaughter! And voices, begging shrill the merciful grace of death.

Hermann Hagedorn; There’s nothing like a war to make a man president

James Norman Hall: Broken, bleeding bodies with all their beauty gone

Hala Jean Hammond: War’s black hatred

Philip M. Harding: White Feather

C. F. Harper: Song of the Battleships

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Selections on peace and war

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Do Not Cheer, Men Are Dying

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Furl the banners stained with blood, ’till war shall be no more

Frances Ellen Harper Watkins: Grant that peace and joy and gladness may like holy angels tread

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Home from war

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Music to soothe all sorrow till war and crime shall cease

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Peace till war and crime shall cease

Frank Harris: Soulless selfishness of war; Anglo-Saxon domineering combativeness greatest danger to Humanity

Frank Harris: Henri Barbusse and the war against war

Charles Yale Harrison: Selections on war

Charles Yale Harrison: Bombardment, maniacal congealed hatred

Charles Yale Harrison: This is called an artillery duel

Charles Yale Harrison: Two kinds of people in the world, those who like wars and those who fight them

Charles Yale Harrison: War and really murdering someone

Charles Yale Harrison: War is a hell that no god, however cruel, would fashion for his most deadly enemies

Charles Yale Harrison: War’s snarling, savage beasts

Charles Yale Harrison: War’s whispered reminder, you must come back to my howling madness

Charles Yale Harrison: We have learned who our enemies are

Charles Yale Harrison: Who can comfort whom in war? The mother of the man who died at the end of my bayonet

Ernest Hartsock: Let Mars and all his mangled mourners pass

Ernest Hartsock: Who told you God raises sons to slay them all in battle?

W. T. Hawkins: A Song of Peace

Nathaniel Hawthorne: Selections on war

Nathaniel Hawthorne: Did iron-hearted War itself ever do so hard and cruel a thing as this before?

Nathaniel Hawthorne on war: Drinking out of skulls till the Millennium

Nathaniel Hawthorne: Every warlike achievement involves an amount of physical and moral evil

Nathaniel Hawthorne: How glorious it would have been if our forefathers could have kept the country unspotted with blood!

Nathaniel Hawthorne: Slaughter’s way. No laurel wreath can wake the silent dead.

Nathaniel Hawthorne: War personified; red cheek emblem of fire and sword; blackness of other betokened mourning that attends them

Ernest Hemingway: Selections on war

Ernest Hemingway: All armies are the same

Ernest Hemingway: Beaten to start with, beaten when they took them from their farms and put them in the army

Ernest Hemingway: Champs d’Honneur

Ernest Hemingway: Combat the murder that is war

Ernest Hemingway: “Down with the officers. Viva la Pace!”

Ernest Hemingway: “If everybody would not attack the war would be over”

Ernest Hemingway: “It doesn’t finish. There is no finish to a war.”

Ernest Hemingway: Nothing sacred about war’s stockyards

Ernest Hemingway: Perhaps wars weren’t won any more. Maybe they went on forever.

Ernest Hemingway: There are people who would make war, there are other people who would not make war

Ernest Hemingway: Who wins wars?

O. Henry: The ethics of justifiable slaughter

Stefan Heym: Sure it’s a vicious circle, it’s war

Stefan Heym: The whole scene was immersed in the silence of absolute death

Stefan Heym: The world market…making new wars

Amanda M. Hicks: A Truce for the Toilers

Leslie Pinckney Hill: The patriotism of pacifism

Martha Lavinia Hoffman: The Song of Peace

Oliver Wendell Holmes: Hymn to Peace

Oliver Wendell Holmes: Not so enamored of the drum and trumpet

John Horn: False Ideas About War and Peace

Julia Ward Howe: The Development of the Peace Ideal

Julia Ward Howe: Mother’s Day Proclamation 1870

William Dean Howells: Selections on war

William Dean Howells: Editha

William Deans Howells: Everyday sacrifices.”I don’t want to see any more men killed in my time.”

William Dean Howells: If we have war, every good cause will be set back

William Dean Howells to Henry James: The most stupid and causeless war

William Dean Howells: Spanish Prisoners of War

William Dean Howells: On Mark Twain and war

William Dean Howells to Mark Twain: War for humanity turned into war for coal-stations

William Dean Howells: War Stops Literature

William Dean Howells: Warmongers should tremble when they remember that God is just

William Dean Howells: Wilson’s Mexican war, wickeder than that of 1846

Langston Hughes: A mighty army serving human kind, not an army geared to kill

James Huneker: Remy de Gourmont and philosophic abhorrence of war

Frank Walcott Hutt: The Peace Congress

Washington Irving: The laudable spirit of military emulation. Soldiers, poor animals

Washington Irving: Most pacific nation in the world? Rather the most warlike

Washington Irving: The renown not purchased by deeds of violence and blood

Henry James: Beguiled into thinking war, worst horror that attends the life of nations, could not recur

Henry James: No more sacrifice on the altar of war

Henry James: War, the waste of life and time and money

William James: Selections on war

William James: At the least temptation all the old military passions rise and sweep everything before them

William James: The horrors of a war of conquest

William James: The Moral Equivalent of War

William James: Party of civilization must oppose increase of military might

William James: The Philippine Tangle

William James: A sweet little place. One never sees a soldier.

Randall Jarrell: In bombers named for girls, we burned the cities we had learned about in school

Robinson Jeffers: Eagle Valor, Chicken Mind

Robert Underwood Johnson: The fairest of daughters, heavenly Peace

Rossiter Johnson: Infinitely better to learn how to avert war

Rossiter Johnson: Where swell the songs thou shouldst have sung by peaceful rivers yet to flow?

Harry Kemp: I Sing the Battle

Frederic Lawrence Knowles: The New Age. The victory which is peace.

Raymond Kresensky: When patriotism is pushing propaganda for war

Sidney Lanier: Selections on war

Sidney Lanier: Blood-red flower of war, whose odors strangle a people, whose roots are in hell

Sidney Lanier: Death in Eden

Sidney Lanier: Dialogue on the war-flower

Sidney Lanier: War by other means

Sidney Lanier: The wind blew all the vanes in the country in one way – toward war

Richard Le Gallienne: Selections on war

Richard Le Gallienne: Christ at Notre Dame: abhorred be they who ever draw again the sword

Richard Le Gallienne: The Illusion of War

Richard Le Gallienne: Is this to be strong, ye nations, your vulgar battles to fight?

Richard Le Gallienne: A nation is merely a big fool with an army

Richard Le Gallienne: Poetry and war

Richard Le Gallienne: The Rainbow

Ruth Le Prade: Out of Chaos

Derrick Norman Lehmer: Militarism

William Ellery Leonard: The Pied Piper

Sinclair Lewis: Selections on war

Sinclair Lewis: Can’t depend on Providence to supply wars when you need them

Sinclair Lewis: College education makes soldiers more patriotic, flag-waving, and skillful in the direction of slaughter

Sinclair Lewis: The democracy of death

Sinclair Lewis: The disguised increase, false economizing of war budgets

Sinclair Lewis: Don’t much care what kind of war they prepare for

Sinclair Lewis: For the first time in all history, a great nation must go on arming itself more and more…for peace!

Sinclair Lewis: General: State of peace far worse than war

Sinclair Lewis: Get us into war just to grease their insane vanity and show the world that we’re the huskiest nation going

Sinclair Lewis: Inevitable war with Canada, Mexico, Russia, Cuba, Japan, or perhaps Staten Island

Sinclair Lewis: It Can(‘t) Happen Here

Sinclair Lewis: The only thing not absurd about wars was that they kill a good many millions of people

Sinclair Lewis: Other Unavoidable Wars to End All Wars

Sinclair Lewis: Pining for a good war

Vachel Lindsay: Speak Now for Peace

Vachel Lindsay: Tolstoi, that angel of peace

Vachel Lindsay: The Unpardonable Sin

Martha Shepard Lippincott: Nations now for mammon fight

Martha Shepard Lippincott: Peace on Earth

Martha Shepard Lippincott: Shame will fall upon us for barbarous deeds of war

Jack London: Some day all men will counsel peace. No man will slay his fellow. All men will plant.

Jack London: War

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Forevermore, forevermore, the reign of violence is o’er!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: I am weary of your quarrels, weary of your wars and bloodshed

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Peace! and no longer from its brazen portals the blast of War’s great organ shakes the skies!

Amy Lowell: Misericordia

Amy Lowell: A pattern called a war. Christ! What are patterns for?

James Russell Lowell: Selections on war and peace

James Russell Lowell: Dante and universal peace

James Russell Lowell on Lamartine: Highest duty of man, to summon peace when vulture of war smells blood

James Russell Lowell: The military qualifications of a prospective president

James Russell Lowell: Uncle Sam presents his bill for war

James Russell Lowell: A war supporter’s credo

Ernest Neal Lyon: A Dream of Peace

Archibald MacLeish: The disastrous war, the silent slain

Albert Maltz: A children’s wartime bestiary

Albert Maltz: Conquering the world but losing your son

Albert Maltz: “Ten thousand dead today. That’s what the war means.”

Edwin Markham: Peace

Edwin Markham: Peace Over Africa

Edwin Markham: Semiramis, the conqueror

E. P. Marvin: War Disenchanted

Caroline Atherton Mason: Enemy, oh, let our warfare cease!

Edgar Lee Masters: “The honor of the flag must be upheld”

Edgar Lee Masters: The Philippine Conquest

Edgar Lee Masters: The words, Pro Patria, what do they mean, anyway?

Peter Maurin: Disarmament of the heart

John McGovern: War: three letters, fifty million plunged into worst misfortune

Thomas McGrath: All the Dead Soldiers

Thomas McGrath: Homecoming

Thomas McGrath: Nocturne Militaire

Thomas McGrath: Ode for the American Dead in Asia

Thomas McGrath: Senators mine our lives for another war

Grenville Mellen: The Lonely Bugle Grieves

Grenville Mellen: Slaughter rides screaming on the vengeful ball

Herman Melville: Selections on peace and war

Herman Melville: Characterological drawback of consorting with cannon

Herman Melville: Gaining glory by a distinguished slaughtering of their fellow-men

Herman Melville: How can a religion of peace flourish in a castle of war?

Herman Melville: In the solace of the Truce of God, the Calumet has come

Herman Melville: Minister of the Prince of Peace serving the God of War

Herman Melville: Trophies of Peace

Herman Melville: War-pits and rattraps. Soldier sold to the army as Faust sold himself to the devil.

Herman Melville: When shall the time come, how much longer will God postpone it?

Herman Melville: The whole matter of war is a thing that smites common-sense and Christianity in the face

H.L. Mencken: New wars will bring about an unparalleled butchery of men

Thomas Merton: Simone Weil and why nations go to war

Lillian Rozell Messenger: Seeking a new world of peace

Lillian Rozell Messenger: Why this feast of shells each day, the fury, blood and wail of war?

Edna St. Vincent Millay: Conscientious Objector

Edna St. Vincent Millay: Lament

Emily Huntington Miller: Hymn of Peace

Joaquin Miller: The People’s Song of Peace

Ruth Comfort Mitchell: He Went for a Soldier

Harriet Monroe: Over me wash the seas of war

William Vaughn Moody: Bullet’s scream went wide of its mark to its homeland’s heart

Marianne Moore: I must fight till I have conquered in myself what causes war

Angela Morgan: Selections on war and peace

Angela Morgan: Beauty thy call must wait (while world is furrowed by graves of precious youth who died in vain)

Angela Morgan: For the moment’s red renown. Battle Cry of the Mothers.

Angela Morgan: God prays for peace

Angela Morgan: In Spite of War

Angela Morgan: Mothers “Go, fashion the Future’s laws that war shall be no more”

Angela Morgan: The Summons

Angela Morgan: Tell us the battlefields have lied, that men are still immaculate

Angela Morgan: War! Shall you be our lover? War! Shall you be our mate?

Angela Morgan: Whether to yield in meekness to War’s devouring curse

Christopher Morley: Humanity’s most beautiful gift, Peace

Christopher Morley: No enthusiasm for hymns of hate

Jean Lewis Morris: A Patriot I!

Philip Stafford Moxom: The Palace of Peace

Benjamin Musser: Paradox

Charles Eliot Norton: Fighting the devil with his own arms: Declaration of war does not change the moral law

Grace Fallow Norton: O I have heard the drums beat for war!

Sara Louisa Oberholtzer: The dawn of peace is breaking!

Eugene O’Neill: The hell that follows war

Frances Sargent Osgood: Peace and the olive branch

Josephine Preston Peabody: Harvest Moon

Lori Petri: Battleships

David Graham Phillips: Captains of industry, industrial warfare, marauders and renegade generals

David Graham Phillips: Hate war and fightin’ and money grabbin’

John Pierpont: Not on the Battle-Field

Edgar Allan Poe: The Valley of Unrest

Ernest Poole: Apply for death certificates here. War’s house of death.

Ernest Poole: The hatred rising in all men has already butchered millions and will butcher millions more!

Ernest Poole: War cuts off the past from the future

Ernest Poole: War was the fashion. War was a pageant, a thing of romance.

Beatrice Witte Ravenel: Missing. How many women in how many lands wait beside the desolate hearthstone!

Frank C. Reighter: Victim of War’s murd’rous tyranny

Elmer Rice: The expediency of choosing the right side in a war

Charles Richardson: The Dawn of Peace

James Whitcomb Riley: Sang! sang on! sang hate – sang war –

Edwin Arlington Robinson: Though your very flesh and blood the Eagle eats and drinks, you’ll praise him for the best of birds

E. Merrill Root: Drill, like sheep with wolves’ fangs, meek to kill

E. Merrill Root: Military drill. Murder’s witless marionettes.

Rick Rozoff: A Protest

Edwin L. Sabin: Where Will the War be Next?

Edgar Saltus: Soldiers and no farmers; imperial sterility…and demise

Francis Saltus Saltus: Selections on peace and war

Francis Saltus Saltus: Deem you one ambitious whose subjects bleed and perish on a field?

Francis Saltus Saltus: If we saw but a century of peace

Francis Saltus Saltus: Peace to see our Love and Law arrived to witness cruel War

Francis Saltus Saltus: Thy theme was one of utter peace

Francis Saltus Saltus: The wind favors poets over conquerors

Carl Sandburg: Selections on war

Carl Sandburg: And They Obey

Carl Sandburg: The grass grows over Austerlitz and Waterloo

Carl Sandburg: Ready to Kill

Carl Sandburg: Statistics

Carl Sandburg: Wars

Carl Sandburg: What it costs to move two buttons one inch on the war map

George Santayana: Selections on war

George Santayana on war and militarism

George Santayana: Fatal wars: equally needless, equally murderous

George Santayana: If dreadful outer world became troublesome, it would be necessary to make war on it and teach it a lesson

George Santayana: Only the dead have seen the end of war

George Santayana: Such blind battles ought not to be our battles

George Santayana: We want peace and make war

Mary McDermott Santley: The serene light of peace to all mankind

Lawrence Schoonover: Accursed powder

Lawrence Schoonover: An age of strict justice and peace, when nations shall live under law, without war

Lawrence Schoonover: An entire nation praying for peace at one time

Clinton Scollard: Selections on war and peace

Clinton Scollard: Can mankind win to heights of peace and perfect amity?

Clinton Scollard: The Carnival of war

Clinton Scollard: Mars’ mad and holocaustal rite

Clinton Scollard: The Night Sowers

Clinton Scollard: Prayer: bid this reign of hate and horror end!

Clinton Scollard: Sunset Trees

Clinton Scollard: The Vale of Shadows

Clinton Scollard: Victories

Clinton Scollard: The Watcher by the Tower

Clinton Scollard: The Winds of God

Kate Brownlee Sherwood: This one soft whisper – Peace

Robert Sherwood: War is essentially a false, hideous mistake

Lydia Sigourney: Peace was the song the angels sang

Louise Morgan Sill: I am the Hell-god, War!

Upton Sinclair: Selections on war

Upton Sinclair: After war, the color revolution cleanup

Upton Sinclair: A banker’s post-war nightmare

Upton Sinclair: Decade of national cynicism, corruption followed “war for democracy”

Upton Sinclair: Gigantic stir of war preparation for global territorial aggrandizement

Upton Sinclair: How wars start, how they can be prevented

Upton Sinclair: The Juggernaut of war flattens out all opposition

Upton Sinclair: The lost people are those who go to be shot, killed in big war (Dante through Vanzetti)

Upton Sinclair: New Lysistratas: Women must refuse to have babies until men stop killing

Upton Sinclair: The plea of Nicola Sacco, “What is war?”

Upton Sinclair: Spending several times as much money to prepare for an even greater war to end war

Upton Sinclair: U.S. invasion of Russia: nothing but wholesale murder; American army and navy as a world police-force

Upton Sinclair: Using all the machinery and brains of civilization to slaughter one another

Upton Sinclair: The war system, bankers recouping the costs of war propaganda

Upton Sinclair: War’s one-sided boost to the economy

Upton Sinclair: What it costs a woman to keep the world at war

Upton Sinclair: World war as a business enterprise

Ina Duvall Singleton: The Women’s Litany

Rembert G. Smith: O bid the wars of men to cease

Thorne Smith: Make statues of war’s wholesale butchers before they strike

Fanny Bixby Spencer: The shame of the cannonade

Fanny Bixby Spencer: Will your son kill mine or will mine kill yours?

George Sterling: To the War-Lords

George Sterling: War past, present, future

Arthur E. Stilwell: The Day of Peace

Margaret Stineback: The Unknown Soldier

Frank Stockton: Battles of annihilation, the Anglo-American War Syndicate

Frank Stockton: The Great War Syndicate: “On to Canada!”

Sara Teasdale: Dusk in War Time

Sara Teasdale: Spring in War-Time

Edith Matilda Thomas: Air war: They are not humans.

Edith Matilda Thomas: The Altar of Moloch

Edith Matilda Thomas: The Flag

Henry David Thoreau: It is commonly said that history is a chronicle of war

Henry David Thoreau: Taxes enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood

Henry David Thoreau: War belies the claim that civilization is making rapid progress

Eunice Tietjens: Children of War

Edythe C. Toner: The Wraiths

Katrina Trask: Selections on war and peace

Katrina Trask: After the Battle

Katrina Trask: Civilized warfare

Katrina Trask: A dialogue on God and war

Katrina Trask: The Logic of War

Katrina Trask: The Statue of Peace

Katrina Trask: “Wars shall cease. Peace shall knit the world together in a bond of common Brotherhood.”

Lucia Trent: Breed, little mothers, breed for the war lords who slaughter your sons

Lucia Trent: Women of War

Nancy Byrd Turner: Let Us Have Peace

Mark Twain: Selections on war

Mark Twain: The War Prayer

Mark Twain: To the Person Sitting in Darkness

Mark Twain: The basest type of patriotism: support for war and imperialism

Mark Twain: The Battle Hymn of the Republic (Brought Down to Date)

Mark Twain: Cain and mankind’s legacy of war

Mark Twain: Epitome of war, the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal animosity

Mark Twain: Grotesque self-deception of war

Mark Twain: I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.

Mark Twain: Maxims on battleships and statesmanship

Mark Twain: Only dead men dare tell the whole truth about war

Mark Twain: Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War

Mark Twain: An inglorious peace is better than a dishonorable war

Mark Twain on Western military threat to China: I am a Boxer

Mark Twain: Cecil Rhodes and the civilizing mission: He wants the earth and wants it for his own

Louis Untermeyer: Daybreak after war

Henry van Dyke: Stain Not the Sky

Thorstein Veblen: Habituation to war entails a body of predatory habits of thought

Louise B. Waite: Let There Be Peace

Henry Ward: Ode to Peace

Gretchen Warren: Dying Peace

Maurice C. Waugh: A Plea for Peace

James H. West: No More

Nathanael West: Selections on war

Nathanael West: Every defeat is a victory in a war of attrition

Nathanael West: The noble motives, the noble methods of war

Nathanael West: Not their fault, they thought they had bombed a hospital

Nathanael West: One live recruit is better than a dozen dead veterans

Nathanael West: They haven’t the proper military slant

Phillis Wheatley: From every tongue celestial Peace resounds

Robert Whitaker: Whence Cometh War?

Walt Whitman: Away with themes of war! away with war itself!

Anna M. Whitney: The Call for Peace

John Greenleaf Whittier: Selections on peace and war

John Greenleaf Whittier: Disarmament

John Greenleaf Whittier: The Gospel of Christ is peace, not war, and love, not hatred

John Greenleaf Whittier: If this be Peace, pray what is War?

John Greenleaf Whittier: Nobler than the sword’s shall be the sickle’s accolade

John Greenleaf Whittier: The Peace Convention at Brussels

John Greenleaf Whittier: The stormy clangor of wild war music o’er the earth shall cease

Margaret Widdemer: After War

Margaret Widdemer: Men have to wage world-wars, children are left to die

Margaret Widdemer: A Mother to the War-Makers

Margaret Widdemer: War-March

Ella Wheeler Wilcox: Selections on peace and war

Ella Wheeler Wilcox: The Paean of Peace

Ella Wheeler Wilcox: A Plea To Peace

Ella Wheeler Wilcox: What We Need

Ella Wheeler Wilcox: When the Regiment Came Back

Ella Wheeler Wilcox: Women and War

Thomas Wolfe: His imperial country at war, possessed of the inspiration for murder

Thomas Wolfe: Santimony and cant of war

Clement Wood: Seedtime and harvest

Clement Wood: Victory – Without Peace

George Edward Woodberry: American I am; would wars were done

Elinor Wylie: Peace falls unheeded on the dead

Barbara Young: Peace is not bought with dead men slain

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