Since the appearance in print of her early poems over seventy-five years ago, the poetry of Janet Lewis has grown in quiet acclaim and popularity. Although she is better known as a novelist of historical fiction, her first and last writings were poems. With the publication of her selected poems, Swallow Press celebrates the distinguished career of one of its most cherished authors.

Critics as disparate as Kenneth Rexroth, Timothy Steele, Theodore Roethke, Larry McMurtry, N. Scott Momaday, and Dana Gioia have sung the praises of her work over the decades. Her career as a poet was remarkable not only for its longevity but also for the fact that even well into her tenth decade she wrote poems that stand with her very best work.

Characterized by the vigor and sharpness of her images and the understated lyricism that permeates her rhythmic lines. The Selected Poems of Janet Lewis is a survey of modern poetry unto itself.

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.