American Spring Song: The Selected Poems of Sherwood Anderson

A reappraisal of Anderson within the tradition of American progressive poetry

Famous for his modernist fiction, Ohio native Sherwood Anderson has long been recognized almost exclusively as a prose writer despite his prolific published output of poetry between 1915 and 1939. In American Spring Song, editor Stuart Downs reintroduces readers to a body of work rarely seen and never before studied.

With an experimental sensibility, Anderson’s poetry ranges from Whitmanesque to imagist to objectivist to surrealist, making its perspectives on the human spirit and consciousness, class, and gender especially interesting and relevant to contemporary readers. Downs’s comprehensive and contextual introduction reflects on Sherwood Anderson as a major American literary figure as well as on his deep commitment to his poetry. In his presentation and selection of poems, Downs illuminates a connection between Anderson’s poetry and its historical, cultural, personal, and literary influences.

American Spring Song underscores Anderson’s place in American literature―prose and poetry. This important collection will be welcomed by modernist scholars, Anderson specialists, and poets alike.

Stuart Downs holds an MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson College and is employed as director of the Sawhill Gallery at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. His poems have been published in Virginia Quarterly Review, Syllogism, Fourteen Hills: The San Francisco State University Review, 26: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Phoebe: The George Mason University Review.