May Swenson

"What Swenson responds to and values in the world, its essential freedom," writes Susan Mitchell in her foreword to Nature, "is the very quality that is most striking in her as a poet. ... This is a world looked at through love, through generosity of spirit." Nature, the first major compendium of May Swenson's poems in a decade, concentrates on 182 magnificent nature poems drawn from nearly fifty years of work. Swenson, who died in 1989, ranks among...

In Spoon River Anthology, the American poet Edgar Lee Masters (1869–1950) created a series of compelling free-verse monologues in which former citizens of a mythical Midwestern town speak touchingly from the grave of the thwarted hopes and dream of their lives. First published in book form in 1915, the Anthology was the crowning achievement of Masters' career as a poet, and a work that would become a landmark of 20th-century American literature....