April Twilights and Other Poems: Foreword by Robert Thacker [Hardcover]

Before Willa Cather went on to write the novels that would make her famous, she was known as a poet, the most popular of her poems reprinted many times in national magazines and anthologies. Her first book of poetry,April Twilights,was published in 1903, but Cather significantly revised and expanded it in a 1923 edition entitledApril Twilights and Other Poems.This Everyman’s Library edition reproduces for the first time all the poems from both versions ofApril Twilights, along with a number of uncollected and previously unpublished poems by Cather, as well as an illuminating selection of her newly released letters.

In such lyrical poems as “The Hawthorn Tree,” “Winter at Delphi,” “Prairie Spring,” “Poor Marty,” and “Going Home,” Cather exhibits both a finely tuned sensitivity to the beauties of the physical world and a richly symbolic use of the landscapes of myth. The themes that were to animate her later masterpieces found their first expression in these haunting, elegiac ballads and sonnets.WILLA CATHER, author of twelve novels, includingO Pioneers!, My Ántonia, andDeath Comes for the Archbishop, was born in Virginia in 1873 but grew up in Nebraska, where many of her novels are set. She died in 1947 in New York City.Excerpted from the Foreword
 
When she was in her twenties, Willa Sibert Cather (1873–1947) was by any estimate a one-woman literary industry: excerpts from her collected articles and reviews from this time, published mostly in newspapers in Lincoln, Nebraska and Pittsburgh, run to over one thousand pages in two volumes (The World and the Parish, 1970). During this period too she produced stories and poems, tried her hand at a book of drama criticism that never appeared, and was the first American editor – when she was just twenty-three – to republish poems from a new book by A. E. HousmanlÄ