The Lit World Poems from History Author:Tim Miller The Lit World begins with God's voice just before creation, and ends with the destruction of Europe and the last days in Hitler's bunker. The poems between follow these two, either in their focus on atrocity and violence--a Roman consul's mistaken campaigns in the Middle East, a Byzantine Emperor's blinding of thousands of prisoners of war, the ... more »drowning and execution of citizens and clergy during the French Revolution, and the many wars against Native Americans in the West; or in looking to a more contemplative and peaceful life, with monologues from Siberian and Australian shamans, Catholic saints, and a Hindu priest who easily dismisses Alexander the Great's invitation to take him on his campaigns. There are also voices between these, from Walt Whitman looking back on his years away from New York before the Civil War, to Hart Crane's highest moment atop a Catholic church in Mexico, celebrating an Aztec festival; from the Roman Cato of Utica, a suicide, surprised to find himself at the base of Dante's Mount Purgatory, to a sequence of poems from prehistory, imagining the world's first artists and priests painting in the caves of France and Spain amid music and ritual.« less