SOURCE: "May Swenson," in Modern American Women Poets, Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1984, pp. 75-96.

In the following excerpt from her Modern American Women Poets, Gould provides an overview of Swenson's life and career.

It has been said that some people are born disillusioned—in the best sense of the word—and May Swenson might be considered one of the few. The eldest child in a brood of ten children whose Swedish parents had left the faith of their fathers to become ardent Mormons, May, born in 1913, on the twenty-eighth day of the month for which she was named, in Logan, Utah, was indoctrinated into Mormonism at the age of eight; but five years later, when at thirteen, she was teaching Sunday school, she began to regard the fundamentalism of Bible stories as fables or myths. Her viewpoint would have shocked her parents, particularly her father, whose heart and...