Read more
Informationen zum Autor Willa Cather; Foreword by Robert Thacker Klappentext 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 entitled April Twilights and Other Poems. This Everyman's Library edition reproduces for the first time all the poems from both versions of April Twilights, along with a number of uncollected and previously unpublished poems by Cather, as well as an illuminating selection of her newly released letters.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. 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. Housman, A Shropshire Lad (1896). When Cather did publish her first book in the spring of 1903, the year she turned thirty, it is not surprising that her April Twilights displays Housman’s evident influence, among others. That book, published in Boston by Richard G. Badger – a vanity publisher who, notwithstanding, brought out volumes by various poets of note, such as E. A. Robinson – garnered some reasonable reviews, won some admiration, but made no real splash. April Twilights was the first book by this author whose career as a writer spanned the years from 1890s fin de sie`cle decadence through the Modernism of the 1920s and ’30s, and as a poet from the conventional prosody of the late Victorians through the free verse of the Imagists. Steeped in the literary, Cather initially took her inspiration from the classical tradition and from the poets of the nineteenth century, British, Continental, and American. In Housman’s A Shropshire Lad she found a new, authentic voice speaking with freshness and clarity through poems whose inspiration derived from a source she herself saw and felt – a well-known home place recalled in precise detail and tinged with recollected longings. Its best-known poem is ‘‘To an Athlete Dying Young,’’ and that poem echoes throughout Cather’s work. Housman’s poems called out to Cather sufficiently to draw her to his Shropshire during her first visit to Europe in 1902. Having seen and delighted in his places, she wrote to Dorothy Canfield from there that ‘‘somehow it makes it all the greater to have it all true.’’ In that same letter she offers the three stanzas that were to conclude her ‘‘Poppies on Ludlow Castle.’’ On return from Shropshire, having discovered Housman’s address in London, Cather and her traveling companions visited the poet there unannounced. The meeting proved awkward, leaving Cather disappointed. There are a number of versions of what took place, and it was a moment in Cather’s biography that earned her some notoriety and also vexed her. Even when she died in 1947 she was seeking to set the record of that visit straight. Whatever happened that day in Highgate, when April Twilights appeared the next year Housman’s influence was palpa...
