Harriet Zinnes has made important contributions to the arts as a poet, a fiction writer, a translator, a teacher of literature and creative writing, an editor, and a critic of both literature and art. A contemporary of such poets as Charles Olson, Elizabeth Bishop, Karl Shapiro, Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Richard Wilbur, and Denise Levertov, Zinnes shares many aesthetic and social concerns with the major voices of her generation: strongly influenced by the age of high modernism, this generation of writers lived through the Great Depression, were young adults during World War II, and experienced the transition from the prenuclear age to the nuclear age--the transition from the modernist age of fragmentation to the postmodern age of existential angst. Their work ranges from the aesthetic and formal experimentations of Olson's Maximus poems, to the self-consciously populist works of Ferlinghetti and Shapiro, to the distant...