April Twilights and Other Poems

This edition reprints Willa Cather's 1903 collection of poems (called April Twilights) along with the additional poems she added in 1923 (in a collection she called April twilights and other poems). In addition it includes many uncollected and previously unpublished poems, along with a selection of Cather's letters that are relevant to her poetry from The selected letters of Willa Cather, edited by Stout and Jewell and published 2013 by Knopf. 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 Everymans 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the first time all the poems from both versions of April Twilights, along with a number of uncollected and previously unpublished poems by Cather, as well as an illuminating selection of her newly released letters.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.