Léonie Adams has written some of the finest lyrics of the twentieth century, poetry in the tradition of the great English romantics, with influences from the seventeenth-century metaphysicals, Yeats, and the later French symbolists. Her great intellect is manifested in her verse not as intellectuality but as the ordering power of an acute sensibility.

The fifth of sixth children, Léonie Fuller Adams was born on 9 December 1899, in Brooklyn, New York, to Charles Frederic and Henrietta Rozier Adams, parents whose forebears had settled in Maryland as early as the seventeenth century. Charles F. Adams, however, had been born in Santiago, Cuba, where his father had sugar and banking interests; his mother was Venezuelan. He received his formal education in New England and evidently passed along to his daughter some of his own passion for literature. Although Léonie Adams formed several deep friendships at...