Description

pp. 304, “The definitive edition of all of the playwright/poet’s poetry. Tennessee Williams, acknowledged lyric master of American drama, first came to the attention of New Directions founder James Laughlin as a young poet who subsequently appeared in an early anthology, Five Young American Poets, 1944. Over the years, Williams was cajoled into publishing two volumes of his poetry, In the Winter of Cities (1956, expanded in a 1964 paper edition) and Androgyne, Mon Amour (1977). Now, as his letters, his journals, and his previously unpublished plays are appearing to further our understanding of this complex artist whose piercing honesty and compassion for life’s misfits and the dispossessed have won audiences all over the world, it is time to look to the full body of his poetry for insight into the private heart of the man—not his characters—and for appreciation of his unique (and very American) poetic voice. In this definitive edition of The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams, all of the playwright/poet’s previously collected and uncollected published poems, including poems from the plays, have been assembled, accompanied by explanatory notes and selected variants. The collection is the work of textual scholar David Roessel (co-editor, The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, Knopf 1994), and Williams specialist Nicholas Moschovakis, undertaken in conjunction with the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee, who inherited the copyrights to all of Williams’s work.”