Associate editor and cofounder of Poetry magazine in Chicago, Alice Corbin Henderson was an astute critic who early recognized the importance of a number of writers who were later to become well known. An avant-garde poet herself, she experimented with quantity, meter, line breaks, vers libre, and imagism, learning much from Ezra Pound, who praised her work. She was also a scholar of Indian folklore, who regarded folk songs and poems as important sources of inspiration for writers who sought to carve out a distinctly American literary tradition. Her own poems reflect this interest, which developed further after 1916, when she moved to Santa Fe, with its deep roots in ancient Indian culture. Here she became part of a literary group, which included D. H. Lawrence, Witter Bynner, Yvor Winters, and several other poets whose work she gathered in The Turquoise Trail: An Anthology of New Mexico Poetry (1928).

Alice...