Komunyakaa's Pulitzer-winning collected and new poems span his Vietnam War experience (Dien Cai Dau, 1988), his Louisiana childhood, and jazz as a metaphysical system. He is the great African American poet of the war poem; his Vietnam poems are the best of that war by an enormous margin, combining blues rhythm, surrealist image, and a moral seriousness that never becomes preachy. "Facing It," his meditation on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, is among the most perfect short poems in American literature.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.