April Twilights

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April Twilights
AprilTwilights.jpg
First edition cover
Author Willa Cather
LanguageEnglish
GenrePoetry
Publisher The Gorham Press
Publication date
1903
Publication placeUnited States

April Twilights is a 1903 collection of poems by Willa Cather. It was reedited by Cather in 1923 and 1933. [1] The poems were first published in many literary reviews, [2] often under pen names. [3]

Contents

Literary significance and criticism

Cather's influences for the poems were, among others, Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda , Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, Richard Wagner, Virgil's Georgics , William Shakespeare, François Villon, Pierre-Jean de Béranger, John Keats's Endymion and Hyperion , Alphonse Daudet's Kings in Exile , Heinrich Heine's The Gods in Exile and The North Sea , and Edward Coley Burne-Jones. [4]

Cather's favourite poems were Grandmither, Mills of Montmartre and The Hawthorn Tree. [5]

At the time of publication, the collection received mixed reviews; the Pittsburgh Gazette , the New York Times Saturday Review , Academy and Literature , the Criterion , the Bookman , the Chicago Tribune , and the Poet Lore praised it; The Dial thought it was bland. [6] Cather decided to buy the remaining copies and burn them. [5]

Mark Twain praised her poem The Palatine. [7]

It has been noted that Cather broaches 'the enduring aura of a homosexual myth' as she alludes to Antinous several times in her poems. [8]

References

  1. ↑ Bernice Slote, 'Bibliography', Willa Cather, April Twilights, University of Nebraska Press, 1968, page 75
  2. ↑ Bernice Slote, 'Bibliography', Willa Cather, April Twilights, University of Nebraska Press, 1968, pages 53-58
  3. ↑ Bernice Slote, 'Bibliography', Willa Cather, April Twilights, University of Nebraska Press, 1968, page 59
  4. ↑ Bernice Slote, 'Willa Cather and Her First Book', Willa Cather, April Twilights, University of Nebraska Press, 1968, pages xxv-xxviii
  5. 1 2 Bernice Slote, 'Willa Cather and Her First Book', Willa Cather, April Twilights, University of Nebraska Press, 1968, page xxiii
  6. ↑ Bernice Slote, 'Willa Cather and Her First Book', Willa Cather, April Twilights, University of Nebraska Press, 1968, pages xxi-xxiii
  7. ↑ Bernice Slote, 'Willa Cather and Her First Book', Willa Cather, April Twilights, University of Nebraska Press, 1968, page xliii
  8. ↑ John P. Anders, Willa Cather's Sexual Aesthetics and the Male Homosexual Literary Tradition, University of Nebraska Press, 2002, p. 21
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