As part of the ongoing effort of the Ohio University Press/Swallow Press to reintroduce the work of a number of significant twentieth-century poets to a new generation of readers, we are especially enthusiastic about publishing the selected poems of Yvor Winters, whose work and influence was so central to the development of the poetry list at Swallow Press. Yvor Winters (1900-1968) was a friend, colleague, and teacher to poets of several generations from Hart Crane and Allen Tate to J. V. Cunningham, Turner Cassity, and Edgar Bowers to Robert Hass, Philip Levine, and Robert Pinsky. His impact on mid-to-late twentieth-century poetry is profound. This stems in large part from his poetry, which was a reflection of his critical thinking about poetry, and which underwent substantive changes over his career as a poet. His collected poems won the Bollingen Prize in 1960.

This book presents the poetry and letters of the American writer Adelaide Crapsey (1878–1914). Her best poetry deserves to be enjoyed by a larger audience, and her letters and newly discovered biographical materials reveal new charm and meaning in an intriguingly elusive character. Crapsey did not live to see any of her mature poetry published: she received notice that her first poem had been accepted for publication only a week before she died. Posthumous editions of her Verse (in 1915, 1922, and 1934), however, brought her recognition and respect. Carl Sandburg paid her a poetic tribute. American critic Yvor Winters praised her as "a minor poet of great distinction" and felt that her poems remained "in their way honest and acutely perceptive." Her best work is compressed, terse, related in this respect to the work of another American poet who won posthumous recognition, Emily Dickinson. Crapsey is best known as the inventor of the cinquain, a poem of five short lines of unequal length: one-stress, two-stress, three-stress, four-stress, and one-stress. The cinquain is one of the few modern verse forms developed in English, and its brevity and characteristic thought pattern seem to have been influenced by Japanese forms. Crapsey's indebtedness to Japanese poetry and her relation to Imagism have long been subjects for debate. As Winters notes, the work of Crapsey "achieves more effectively than did almost any of the Imagists the aims of Imagism." The critical introduction by Professor Susan Sutton Smith examines these problems. Much of Crapsey's poetry is reticent, withdrawn, and private, and she believed strongly in the individual's right to privacy. Whatever new biographical materials reveal of her and of her relations with family and friends, however, shows a charming and courageous woman. Her courage and humor show especially well in her correspondence with her friend Esther Lowenthal and in the letters with her friend Jean Webster McKinney, author of Daddy Long-Legs, who died soon after Crapsey.

This collection covers the span of Thom Gunn's remarkable poetic career over almost forty years. Gunn has made a speciality of playing style against subject as he deals with the out-of-control through tightly controlled meters and with the systematized through open forms.

No poet has been more wilfully contradictory than John Donne, whose works forge unforgettable connections between extremes of passion and mental energy. From satire to tender elegy, from sacred devotion to lust, he conveys an astonishing range of emotions and poetic moods. Constant in his work, however, is an intensity of feeling and expression and complexity of argument that is as evident in religious meditations such as 'Good Friday 1613. Riding Westward' as it is in secular love poems such as 'The Sun Rising' or 'The Flea'. 'The intricacy and subtlety of his imagination are the length and depth of the furrow made by his passion,' wrote Yeats, pinpointing the unique genius of a poet who combined ardour and intellect in equal measure.

Harold Hart Crane was born in Ohio in 1899. In 1923 he became a copy-writer in New York. White Buildings, his first collection, appeared in 1926, and in 1930 his most famous work, The Bridge, was published. A reaction against the pessimism in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, The Bridge was a love song to the myth of America and its optimism a much needed boon to post-Wall Street Crash America. Hart Crane committed suicide in 1932.

"She is a master of poetic style and of her material. No poet in English writes with more authority."-Yvor Winters "Pinkerton's work is . . . remarkable for its intelligence. Her poems are not only enjoyable to read, but rewarding to think about. Philosophically, she seems to be a dualist, in the sense that she regards life as a continual negotiation between mutually essential, but seemingly opposed, elements. Her poems strive to balance and connect the transient and the timeless, matter and spirit, reason and faith, our particular lives and Being itself."-Timothy Steele "Her poetry, in form and in content, is both traditional and original. In the best sense of the word, it is poetic."-John Baxter, in Sequoia In 1959 Helen Pinkerton published her first book of poems, Error Pursued. In the fifty seven years since that date, Pinkerton's publication of poetry has remained as rare as her poems are well-wrought. Slim chapbooks such as Bright Fictions: Poems on Works of Art, and "The Harvesters" and Other Poems on Works of Art, followed, both published by R.L. Barth. In 2002, Swallow Press-Ohio University Press published the body of her work to that date in Taken in Faith: Poems. This latest collection, A Journey of the Mind: Collected Poems of Helen Pinkerton:1945-2016, contains the life work of an authoritative master of poetic style. By turns lyrical and devotional, historical and metaphysical, the poems herein lead us from the beginning to the end of a life lived in submission to the Muse. About the Author Helen Pinkerton is a poet, essayist, and scholar of American and English literature. Her poems as have appeared in such journals as The Paris Review, The Sewanee Review, and The Southern Review. The 1999 winner of the Allen Tate Poetry Prize, she has taught poetry, fiction, and the writing of poetry at Stanford, Michigan State, and other universities. She lives in Grass Valley, California.

Thom Gunn was an Elizabethan poet in modern guise, though there's nothing archaic, quaint, or sepia-toned about his poetry. His method was dispassionate and rigorous, uniquely well suited for making a poetic record of the tumultuous time in which he lived. Gunn's dozens of brilliantly realized poems about nature, friendship, literature, sexual love, and death are set against the ever-changing backdrop of San Francisco—the druggy, politically charged sixties and the plague years of AIDS in the eighties. Perhaps no contemporary poet was better equipped—by temperament, circumstance, or poetic gift—to engage the subjects of eros and thanatos than Thom Gunn. This new Selected Poems, edited and with an introduction by the poet August Kleinzahler, supplants the 1979 Selected, presenting more of the later work and providing a fuller retrospective account of the breadth and magnitude of Gunn's extraordinary achievement.

Explores the question: How do poems end? This work examines numerous individual poems and examples of common poetic forms in order to reveal the relationship between closure and the overall structure and integrity of a poem.