April Twilights

April Twilights is a 1903 collection of poems by Willa Cather. It was reedited by Cather in 1923 and 1933.[1] The poems were first published in many literary reviews,[2] often under pen names.[3]

April Twilights
First edition cover
AuthorWilla Cather
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
GenrePoetry
PublisherThe Gorham Press
Publication date
1903

Literary significance and criticism

Cather's influences for the poems were, among others, Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, Richard Wagner, Virgil's Georgics, William Shakespeare, François Villon, Pierre-Jean de Béranger, John Keats's Endymion and Hyperion, Alphonse Daudet's Kings in Exile, Heinrich Heine's The Gods in Exile and The North Sea, and Edward Coley Burne-Jones.[4]

Cather's favourite poems were Grandmither, Mills of Montmartre and The Hawthorn Tree.[5]

At the time of publication, the collection received mixed reviews; the Pittsburgh Gazette, the New York Times Saturday Review, Academy and Literature, the Criterion, the Bookman, the Chicago Tribune, and the Poet Lore praised it; The Dial thought it was bland.[6] Cather decided to buy the remaining copies and burn them.[5]

Mark Twain praised her poem The Palatine.[7]

It has been noted that Cather broaches 'the enduring aura of a homosexual myth' as she alludes to Antinous several times in her poems.[8]

References
  1. Bernice Slote, 'Bibliography', Willa Cather, April Twilights, University of Nebraska Press, 1968, page 75
  2. Bernice Slote, 'Bibliography', Willa Cather, April Twilights, University of Nebraska Press, 1968, pages 53-58
  3. Bernice Slote, 'Bibliography', Willa Cather, April Twilights, University of Nebraska Press, 1968, page 59
  4. Bernice Slote, 'Willa Cather and Her First Book', Willa Cather, April Twilights, University of Nebraska Press, 1968, pages xxv-xxviii
  5. Bernice Slote, 'Willa Cather and Her First Book', Willa Cather, April Twilights, University of Nebraska Press, 1968, page xxiii
  6. Bernice Slote, 'Willa Cather and Her First Book', Willa Cather, April Twilights, University of Nebraska Press, 1968, pages xxi-xxiii
  7. Bernice Slote, 'Willa Cather and Her First Book', Willa Cather, April Twilights, University of Nebraska Press, 1968, page xliii
  8. John P. Anders, Willa Cather's Sexual Aesthetics and the Male Homosexual Literary Tradition, University of Nebraska Press, 2002, p. 21
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