May Swenson, Robert Duncan, William Meredith, Howard Nemerov, and Richard Wilbur Summary

May Swenson received a degree in science and then moved to New York City in 1949. She spent much of her life as an editor and avoided the professional literary life. Her poetry has been described as perceptive and full of curiosity. All of her work relies on plays on words, unusual points of view, surprising juxtapositions, and riddles. The poems in her section include "Teleology," "Unconscious Came a Beauty," "Stone Gullets," "Staying at Ed's Place," and "Strawberrying."

Robert Duncan was adopted for his astrological chart and grew up saturated with hermetic myths. He had been associated with the Black Mountain poets, the San Francisco Renaissance, and the Beats. His poems differed from others in these groups, because his were more visionary; he was...