One can rightly complain that poets like Snodgrass and Lowell in choosing [the] monologue form commit themselves to a moral and psychological perspective on history that is at best confining and at worst anachronistic (since individual characters shape history less directly now than they did in pre-industrial eras). Yet these poets have little intention of bringing contemporary historiography into poetry. They seem rather to conceive of themselves as renovators of history. They try to address exactly what's missing in contemporary historiography: put broadly, a sense of justice and of humanity, or character. (p. 118)

Snodgrass once indicated that to render the death-camps even credible was almost beyond the power of literature; in [The Führer Bunker], he focuses instead only on those people who visited Hitler's bunker between April 1 and May 1, 1945. The result is a book that is, in view of its ambition, disappointing.

Snodgrass intends this gallery of...