One of America's most important early modernist painters and a leading practitioner of postimpressionist and expressionist styles, Marsden Hartley was also a prolific poet whose work was published in most of the influential little magazines of the 1920s. A friend of figures such as William Carlos Williams, Robert McAlmon, Hart Crane, and Gertrude Stein, Hartley was caught between a strong commitment to an American identity as an artist and an equally strong attraction to the experimental forms of European art. His public identification with German art contributed to the decline of his reputation after the 1920s, and, although many critics believe he found his true vocation after his return to Maine at the end of his career, he never regained the public attention he had once commanded during his association with the Alfred Stieglitz circle in the late 1910s and early 1920s.

The artist-poet was born Edmund Hartley...