One of the first American poets to employ the techniques of the French surrealists, Charles Henri Ford has nonetheless, in the course of a long career, written poetry that is distinctly in the American grain--poems very much in the tradition of Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams, poems whose images and cadences have evoked for their own purposes the popular American culture of their times.

Born in Brookhaven, Mississippi, to Charles Lloyd and Gertrude Cato Ford, Charles Henri Ford began his poetic career early, having a poem published in the New Yorker when he was only fourteen ("Interlude," 20 August 1927). The following year the New Yorker published another of his poems, "In the Park (For a Gold Digger)" (26 May 1928), and by 1929 he had also had poems published in such little magazines as free verse, Contemporary Verse, Bozart, and Palo Verde. During these years he was educating himself about the...