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.