Gery, John, Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary Poetry: Ways of Nothingness, University Press of Florida, 1996.

Gery examines both the direct and the indirect impact of the nuclear threat on American poets from Gertrude Stein to James Merrill, providing detailed readings of over fifty poems and four general groups into which poems might be categorized: protest poetry, apocalyptic lyric poetry, psycho-historical poetry, and the poetry of uncertainty.

Forché, Carolyn, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, W. W. Norton, 1993.

In this extremely popular anthology, Forché collects the works of poets from around the world who bear witness in their poems to atrocities such as war, famine, and violent discrimination.

Lifton, Robert Jay, and Nicholas Humphrey, eds., In a Dark Time, Harvard University Press, 1984.

Psychiatrists Lifton and Humphrey have collected excerpts from literature of the last 2,500 years that comment on the psychological and imaginative confusion surrounding war. Lifton...