The poems in this book cover the years 1937–1957. The hitherto published poems are drawn from two previous collections: Have Come, Am Here,* 1942, and Volume Two, 1949. I have here retained only those poems that I can still care about: meaning that, like it or not, a person matures and so does a poet: only that a poet’s maturation also involves that of his craft, so that work written earlier, however true to his intellectual or spiritual vision, may later no longer please him for the simple reason that his sense of craft has further refined. Some poems, therefore, I have felt needed revision, and the extent of revision naturally depended on the particular poem.
The work accomplished since these volumes is in the section of New Poems and Adaptations. The Adaptations are conversions of prose into poetry: into poetic constructions: an experiment that has held my special interest since first trying it out in 1951. A further explication of their method will be found in the note preceding the group in the book.
I have appended a section of Early Poems, comprising what I deem to be the best of the work done in early youth. These poems have not had publication before and appear in print here for the first time.
The new poems are acknowledged to: Botteghe Oscure, The London Times Literary Supplement, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, Wake, and The Yale Literary Magazine, where they first appeared.
JGV